dental insurance question, please help!?

Question

I have an impacted wisdom tooth trying to come in, and I have braces. If i dont get this tooth out, it will ruin my straight teeth thats taken 4 YEARS to accomplish. I have no insurance, because I recently got dropped off my moms policy. A lot of insurance companies ive called do not offer insurance right away, you have to wait a month or so before its "effective".
Does anybody know of a good company I can go through that i will not have to "wait" for.

Please help, i dont have a lot of time to wait, and my wisdom tooth is KILLING me.:(

Answer 1

Don't worry about your braces because nothing will happen to your braces because of wisdom tooth eruption . getting removed wisdom tooth is a surgical procedure so you can approach dentist &tell him about this,so that they can plan to remove tooth surgically ,for that u need to get admitted ,which will cover the insurance

Answer 2

I doubt you can get insurance that will cover this in a speedy fashion. In case you can't, I have some other suggestions because an impacted wisdom tooth is so painful.

First, if there is a dental college in your area or a community college that has a dental hygienist program, you probably could get care there for a greatly reduced rate. (A dentist would be working on you, the hygienist student needs experience; if it's a dental student, he's closely supervised.)

If you're near Mexico, they have a lot of wonderful dentists. My parents would use them all the time for more than a decade and never had a problem. They and their staff will speak English also.

Call around. You wouldn't believe the price variation out there. I am in the process of having a crown and I'm going to pay my dentist $500 for both of the visits necessary as well as a porcelain crown. My brother uses a different one because of "insurance" and is going to pay a grand! My dentist is VERY experienced and the practice has been around for a couple of decades so this is no fly-by-night cut-rate loser or poser. He's also VERY gentle, thank God.

Frankly, I will never bother with dental insurance because you can find good dentists at reasonable rates if you do a lot of investigating and the city is large enough for real competition.

Good luck with that. Be VERY careful if you have to go on a payment plan. The article didn't state dentists were doing this, but a lot of doctors and hospitals are, and where ever a buck is to be made, the credit card people are always there.
It's a BusinessWeek cover story for 3 Dec 2007--people inadvertently are being enrolled for a medical credit card (think it's financing with the provider. Ha! With 27% interest, you better know what you're signing.)
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnfl...

Answer 3

There is a lot of great advice given by these answers. I just wanted to add that using a dental financing company may afford you the help you need. You get the tooth extracted, the dentist gets paid, and you get a certain time frame to pay off the work...just like buying a couch or TV. Lets say you opt for the 12 month interest free payment plan and the extraction and anesthesia costs you $1200.00 (I live in NY and this is about the going rate) You pay the heathcare credit card company $100.00 per month - or $25.00 per week - for 12 months. But be forewarned: if you do not pay it off in time your interest rate jumps dramatically from 0% to upwards of 20%. (You stated that you recently got dropped from your moms insurance which leads me to believe that you are somewhere between 19 and 25. This is a great way to build much needed credit.) This is a great solution. Your other option is to go to a local Dental School. You will get great care and a greatly reduced fee. If it is attached to a hospital, then you may even be able to get your fee adjusted on a sliding scale depending on last years income.

Side note: Forget about getting insurance just for this. If your premium is $60.00 per month (probably more) and they only pay about 80% for oral surgery minus any non covered expenses and deductibles you've just paid more than out of pocket for the extraction.

Answer 4

No insurance company will cover you for Preexisting Conditions and the reason there is a Waiting Period is to protect themselves from people with problems from trying to get them to pay for Preexisting Conditions ...Think about it...

If you had a car and no insurance you can't get into an accident and then call around for an insurance company to insure you, can you? Of course not, because everyone will wait to the need arises an then go out to pay any insurance they will need at the time.

Example, you pay a $100 premium then get $1000 dollars back in claims. What's to stop you from canceling your insurance right after the claim is paid! How long will the BIG MEAN INSURANCE COMPANIES be around after everyone caught on to that?

I suggest you look around for a HEALTH CARE DISCOUNT PLAN. Most of them do indeed cover preexisting conditions because they do not offer full coverage, but a discount off of services performed by dentists and/or doctors that are on their approved lists.

I have sold both types of plans in the past and I have found that many of the discount plans offer very good discounts on services rendered.

As a matter of fact some of them were even better then regular Dental Insurance because tradition Dental has caps on coverage, usually only a $1000 per year, and the discount plans do not. And the best parts are that there may not be any WAITING PERIOD and the premiums are a lot less.

Check around to see what is out there and be sure there is a dentist, or in your case an Oral Surgeon, in your area to go to.

Another option is to check out dental schools in your area and let them work on you for practice or suck it up and pay for the extraction...think how much more you will have to pay and endure if you ruin your new straght teeth!

Answer 5

KIMBERLY,

YOU DON'T NEED INSURANCE TO GET DENTAL CARE.
ALL YOU NEED IS CASH OR A CREDIT CARD. MANY DENTISTS WILL OFFER A DISCOUNT FOR PATIENTS W/O INSURANCE.