My little brother was working on a dental tourism startup a couple years ago, and we stayed in Los Algodones for a few weeks scoping the place out. More than half of all storefronts in the town are dental offices. Some of them seem pretty sketchy, but the reputable ones are very modern, nice and cheap. We spoke with dozens of dental tourists down for a few days to get their work done and they universally had good things to say about the experience. If I needed major dental work done, I wouldn't hesitate to go down there and get it done with one of the reputable providers like https://sanidentalgroup.com/ .
In my long history of dental work, I have never once been told the cost of a procedure before agreeing to it.
This might be true. It doesn't have to be. If your dentist won't tell you the price of an exam before she does it, and won't immediately give you an itemized treatment plan after the exam is complete, find another dentist. Dentistry is not like going to the hospital.
My experience has been that dentists and optometrists are happy to give prices up front if you ask. Doctors, not so much - does this have to do with health insurance and billing being so much more complicated?
Yes. It's also the structure of the insurance policies. Dental insurance typically has a relatively low annual maximum payout which caps the insurer's losses on any given customer. Health insurers have the potential for nearly unlimited liability on any given customer and design Kafkaesque processes to try to wriggle out of it.
Health insurance is awful, but dental insurance isn't much better.
Employer-provided dental insurance is fine. Don't buy it yourself, however. If you have few dental problems, it will just be a way to pay an extra percentage over standard exams and cleanings. If you need a lot of work, however, a standard private plan will pay for a portion of the work done on one tooth in any particular year. Private paid dental insurance is basically never a good investment.
It is better to borrow when you need dental work you can't immediately afford than to waste money on dental insurance.
Is this a US only thing? In most European countries prices are published on dentist's website. For more complex cases, where a whole range of procedures are needed, they'd assess you first and then provide itemised plan on how It'd look. Of course,in some high end clinics,where nobody cares about the prices and only millionaires are the patients, that may not be the case.
While I've never had problems finding great dentistry anywhere I live in Canada, this story resonates with me about just how bad my teeth are. Partly my fault, it's become by a wide margin my biggest anxiety in life. Once I got my CPAP machine the cavities stopped but the permanent damage was done.
I have a lot I could say but I wanted to share this one thing: the thing I hate so much about dental care is that it's a losing battle. Your teeth can never heal. They either stay the same or get worse. When I get sick I eventually get better^. When I get a cavity it's amputation time.
^of course there's countless ways this isn't true. But as a young person this is my perspective and experience.
Yeah, saw a lot of billboards down near Yuma for dentists on the other side of the border. I think it's a great idea.
I've never been to Mexico, but enjoy dropping the Google street viewer into the streets of Mexico and virtual driving around. It does look like a different world from the U.S. It reminds me of the U.S. maybe 50 years ago for some reason. Much more working class, fewer strip malls, chains. But maybe I'm just strolling down the wrong streets....
For the Americans: You can get a cheap ~$120/year dental insurance plan that has no yearly or annual out-of-pocket maximum dollar limits, no waiting periods, and no pre-exsisting condition clauses. Yes, it is a dental HMO plan and it’s through Delta Dental. It covers pretty much everything except implants and TMJ care, and the prices are quite impressive for US dental care. You will get a better deal for such a plan off of Costco [1] (which is only for Costco members, along with only being available in certain states) compared to the Delta Dental website [2] (which I believe is available in all US states).
As for needing to get dental implants (or even advanced TMJ care), you can get Swiss made implants for ~$1,000 per tooth in some of the more “eastern” (although they are quite westernized and the quality of care is very high—along with the materials being on par if not better than American FDA requirements) European Union countries like Poland or Croatia. When travelling to Europe, I typically find the cheapest one-way ticket to the European continent via any major hub city, then I fly via a discount airliner from the hub to the destination city.
There are legitimate health agencies and websites that are set up for dental tourism. I recall seeing one before that posted the implant success rates by clinic, but I no longer remember the name of the site. I personally have jacked up (although nice looking) teeth due to rare disease plus long-standing diabetes. Anyways, I linked the Costco dental insurance plan specifics for Texas [3] and California [4] residents, so you can see how much it actually costs for care.
