Posted on 07/08/2011 2:19:10 PM PDT by WOBBLY BOB
Back in April I wrote about a person near and dear to me — yes, my husband — who needed two new crowns for $3,442. I published his experience in a post, Is Your Dentist Ripping You Off? Dentists howled in protest at the provocative headline, though most agreed with the content of the story.
(Excerpt) Read more at shine.yahoo.com ...
If a bridge won’t stay in either the bridge is bad or the drilling done to allow for the bridge is bad. If multiple bridges won’t stay in it’s the drilling, and you could be hosed.
No, he needs to start working his butt off to pay his mortgage for his doublewide, or his landlord will sell his children.
;)
That is where the costs are in overhead. Most offices are in the 70% + range. Dentists are surgeons. It is the highest stress profession there is. Crowns are not that profitable when you figure in the gold and the other lab fees plus the overhead of the office. The costs in Mexico are less but you will lose your time and your gasoline.
Well both dentist claimed that the bridge was a good fit, so??
I live in a doublewide and my dentist just died in a motorcycle accident (both true).
They don’t have overhead like dentists. Anybody in private practice medicine is paying well over 1 million a year in malpractice insurance, and that’s IF they’ve never screwed up. Then you have all that equipment for dentist, none of that equipment is cheap. And then the disposables (gloves, masks, suction heads, etc). And we haven’t even gotten to the cost of the building and staff. Really you should check out the prices on this stuff:
http://idsdental.stores.yahoo.net/codeoppa.html
Now THAT’S overhead.
Holy molars!!!!!
If it falls out repeatedly it’s not a good fit. Unless you’re one of those people whose saliva eat the cement (my wife “digests” the normal temp compound almost instantly, temp crowns fall out before she even gets home), but they’ve got multiple compounds they should have tried by now.
I was going to go to one of those in Juarez. Then I decided I preferred my life to a new crown.
You want smart remarks?
I went to my dentist last week. I told him, “Hey doc, you’re looking a little down in the mouth.”
He said he was having a hard day at the orifice.
I said, “I know what’ll cheer you up - a little music.” So I sang ‘The Yanks are Coming!’
The time before that my cavity wasn’t fixed by my regular dentist, but by a guy who was filling in.
People in Minnesota have no concept of how high premiums are for malpractice insurance. The typical insurance premium for an internal medicine doctor amounts to one-third his gross. Of course the Minnestoopidan replies +Oh, he must be a bad doctor then, he’s screwed up a lot”. Never mind that I described it as typical, average.
“Anybody in private practice medicine is paying well over 1 million a year in malpractice insurance...”
Baloney.
My Father in-law is a Dentist, and my wife works for him. I’m not sure how it differs in other states but here in Washington the insurance companies heavily dictate how much the Dentist can charge for the different services. What’s been happening to him, is his cost of supplies have been going up each year taking the biggest jump this last year, yet Washington Dental Service one of the biggest insurers will not allow him to raise his prices, so the increased overhead has to come out of the office portion of the fee. Many offices have had to let employees go to keep in business. The office across the hall from his had to lay off half the girls. My Father in-law avoided this by cutting down the girls hours and making them rotate, and now he does his own Hygienist work instead of hiring one to come in.
This fixed insurance price makes it difficult to over charge, but some unethical Dentist may talk the patient into a $700 Crown when a 2 surface $112 Amalgam would have worked fine. Like you should for a mechanic, do the same for a Dentist. When you find an honest one, stick with him.
I have overhead, including large insurance bills and costs of equipment. So does everybody else in business, Dentists seem to have no more costs than anybody else.
I got a whole mouthful of crowns about 30 years ago. They cost about 400 each. With inflation that is about 1200 each today compared to this article’s 1700 each. I may have gotten a lower price because I did not use Novocaine and the DR was able to do the everything in 4 sittings. I did loose one early on which cost me another 300-400. These were all for molars. I think I recall front teeth would have been more.
I assume the materials today are superior.
So it looks like the costs have increased more than inflation assuming I didn’t get a quantity discount and I got the same quality.
On the overall cost side, my dental costs went almost to zero after having the crowns.
Yes everybody has overhead. And they pass it on to the customers. Had you bothered to read the article you’d have seen them discuss the fact that 60 to 80% of what you pay goes straight to their overhead. so which part of that 20% they’re keeping is “too expensive”. I’ll tell you: none. Sorry you don’t like paying the price, but that’s you being too cheap not them being too expensive.
Your 100% correct. See my post #34.
If I was going to offer advice to someone wanting to go into the field I would steer them to the Dental Hygienists field. If you work for a few Dentist so you can stay busy 5 or 6 days a week, you can make as much or more than the Dentist, yet go to school for it a quarter of the time he had to. Plus their overhead is much smaller.
I typically use used parts on my vehicles. Know where I can find a second hand crown?
I've lived a while in Mexico. I saw the dentistry there. Get it done here. Pay more.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.