Hi folks - I am on the verge of retirement after some 40 years in the workforce in one form or another. Yaay!
I have always had dental and vision insurance available via my employer. Sometimes I was my employer. Whatever we had, it cost something extra, but not much. And was generally well worth the premiums paid most years.
I find now that Medicare and all the various supplements and replacements and Parts and pieces do not address that need at all. I do have all my Medicare and Medicare supplement stuff squared away. But I don’t have any good ideas on dental or vision. Yes, I can Google up the usual suspects and read their websites as well as the next geezer.
Here I’m mostly looking for practical advice on whether you think there’s a need for those insurances, who you use that you’re happy with or pissed off at, etc.
Our advisor said most of the dental and vison plans for 65+ were crap, and we’re better off paying out of pocket. That’s what we’re doing. So far, no regrets.
I suspect you can live without vision insurance. I’ve had it while employed and it doesn’t cover much; a basic eye exam and really basic frames and simple lenses. It doesn’t cover the majority of the frames at most optical shops and doesn’t cover bifocals, progressives or fancy coatings.
Dental insurance on the other hand, I don’t know. Googling, you can get an individual plan through Delta Dental.
ISTM the value of the insurance plans, especially dental, is getting the negotiated reduced price for services versus paying the full walk-up retail rate. Although I don’t know how much that is true in the dental biz vs. the medical biz where it’s common that even if you’re paying the full tab yourself (e.g. before your annual deductible is filled), the price the medical folks charge is just 15-20% of what they label as “full price” that presumably an uninsured person would pay.
My experience with employer vision plans is they eat a tremendous amount of the cost of fancy frames, progressive lenses, and all the rest. And high-end contacts. So IME it’s not just a few bucks off on the loss-leader basics on the bottom shelf.
Are you aging up to Medicare? There are many advantage plans that cover dental and vision. You pay extra out of your social security.
Mr Wrekker has had good luck with a Blue cross advantage plan. He says it’s worth it.
There are people you can see that will assess your needs and find you the best priced plan. I forget what they’re called but essentially it’s an insurance company who specializes in Senior or retirement health policies.
ETA, I see you are Medicare eligible. See an expert.
Talk to your dentist to see if they offer a plan just for their office. For example mine offers two dental exams a year along with teeth cleaning and an annual X-ray–along with a 15% discount for additional treatments.
My experience with self-pay vision and dental policies was that they tended to cost more and not cover as much as the employer-based ones and were generally not worth it. It’s been a very long time since I checked, though, so that may be outdated. Also, I have a dentist I’m very loyal to, and if I’d been willing to go to change dentists, I might have seen more savings.
Even with dental coverage, they generally won’t pay more than 50% for things like crowns, and most plans cover a smaller percentage of the cost of bridgework or dentures, if they cover them at all. I haven’t priced plans recently, but the last time I did, it made more sense to bank the money and pay out of pocket.
I went for the top of the line supplemental plan from BC/BS to go with my rest of Medicare A and B. Worth every penny to me, never had a service refused. At the time of enrollment I opted to get the dental coverage tacked onto that supplemental with BC/BS. I’ve tracked the premiums and the cost of services covered if I have had to have paid for them. I’ve come out a bit ahead, plus I get some peace of mind. The coverage has softened the blow for crowns and root canals.
Vision wasn’t worth it. My annual eye exam (except for the lens refraction) if paid for by Medicare medical. Exceeding high quality eyeglasses are shocking affordable at Costco.
What I really want is hearing aid coverage~those puppies can be $5,000 a pair and come with on-going maintenance expenses that are onerous.
I agree. I had coverage with Delta Dental for a few years before I dropped it. The annual premium was $500+ with a $1,000 annual limit of coverage meaning I was paying $500+ for $500 worth of recoverable coverage. Add to that, I never exceeded the $1,000 and my annual dental out of pocket was less than $500. When my dentist dropped Delta as a preferred dentist, I never renewed the policy because it was a lose-lose proposition.
I had vision coverage with VSP and the situation was similar as the dollars I either saved or recovered never justified the annual premium. The last year I had coverage, during my routine vision exam, one additional non-routine test was performed and VSP refused to pay anything relating to the entire exam claiming they do not coordinate benefits with other insurers - in this case Medicare and Medicare does not cover vision exams so that expense was out of pocket.
This is exactly right. The way they all work is that you pay about $500 per year, and the maximum possible payout is in the range of $1000-$1500 per year. So the economics of that in itself is a “shrug”, it’s of little consequence. But what’s really important is not having to worry about whether a dentist is charging you a fair price, especially (as is so often the case with dentistry) you need urgent treatment for something. WIth insurance, even if you have maxed out your payout for the year and it’s 100% out of pocket, as you say you’re still getting the insurer’s contracted prices.
However… you don’t necessarily want to go with a plan has cut negotiated rates to the bone, because you will just find that few dentists (and none of the good dentists) accept them. I use Delta Dental, which seems to be widely accepted. I was contemplating switching to BCBS a couple of years ago because it seemed like a better deal for me, but then I discovered that very few dentists accepts them because their rates are so low.
Only if I had a long term dentist I completely trusted on pricing and I rarely traveled would I give up the policy.
I went back and forth with this question when I was in the same boat. I ended up tacking on dental, vision, and hearing for $17 a month, which comes out to $207 per year.
While there is a lot that it does not cover, I figured that dental cleanings alone would cost me $200 per year out of pocket. I’m comfortable with my choice.
I retired and kept my vision insurance through COBRA. I could have kept dental, but it wasn’t worth the premiums for me. The vision is $10/mo for both me and my husband- and although it only covers the basics (frames, lenses (including bifocal) , and I have to pay for extras ( progressives, tinting) it’s worth it because we both wear glasses and know we get a pair every two years. Might not be worth it if one of us didn’t need glasses.
“Dental insurance” isn’t insurance. The point of insurance is to manage risk and make the customer’s expenses more predictable. Insurance programs pay for the most expensive unexpected things, and might not pay at all for small predictable expenses. “Dental insurance” is the exact opposite, paying for small predictable expenses and not covering big unexpected ones.
For this reason, the sellers often call them “dental plans”, and don’t use the word “insurance”.
My dentist thinks there’s no point to “dental insurance” and offers a 20% discount to patients who don’t have it. This reflects at least partly that the dentist doesn’t get their full charge paid by the “insurance”.
If your dentist gives a discount to patients who don’t have “insurance” and doesn’t get the full charges paid, s/he almost certainly is a participating provider for at least some plans. My dentist did not participate and always got his full fee- I had to pay him and wait for my plan to reimburse me whatever they did.
ALl forms of medical insurance suffer from this a bit. But you’re right dental is worse than most.
A bit like airline ticket pricing, medical/dental pricing is a very opaque mess. in some sense the insurance (or “plan”) premiums merely represent prepaid expenses and you’re hoping to “buy down” the cost of services rendered by the provider’s agreed-upon rate with the insurer.
In a very real sense it’s like the $120 (?) it costs per year to belong to Costco before you can shop there. You hope to save more on your annual merchandise purchases than $120. Meanwhile Costco hopes to sell lots of unused or barely-used memberships. And Costco does still make a profit on what they sell for cheap while hoping the $120 spur to shop there makes you a more loyal = higher volume customer for them.
It’s all a crooked racket, playing on the math-irrational behaviors of consumers. But I’d like to play the racket as smart as I can.
The most that Delta Dental (as an example) pays is 1,500 per year. Cleanings are paid Other charges are only a portion of the cost. My premium is 52$ a month.
Before I had insurance I just paid out 9,000 for a broken bridge that I replaced with those drilled posts and 2 teeth.It took 10 months start to finish. I have 3 other bridges and more caps on teeth. I may get my good out of it -maybe not. Also my medicare supplemental insurance has about the same benefit but no dentist locally.
Well, of course dentists think there’s no point in having somebody else keep their pricing reasonable. They much prefer to offer a “20% discount” on a price that they can set themselves.
I’ve been looking at the same thing. I looked at some insurance offered through IEEE. It is unlikely I could ever recover what I pay, and there is a one year delay in paying for major work - outside of cleanings. And my dentist isn’t part of their plan.
Unfortunately there is a new dentist in the office who seems to want to pay off his student loan. On me. Things have gotten a lot more aggressive and expensive since he came. Has anyone had any luck getting estimates? I have a non-emergency which is quoted as very expensive, and I think it might be worth checking out larger practices to see if they are cheaper.
They more profit-oriented shall we say practitioners definitely count on patient reluctance to change docs. But we never have a problem doing that when we move to a different city, so why the reluctance?
For sure as we get older stuff gets flakier in our mouths and everywhere else. My own rule of thumb is “the moment I suspect their motives I change docs”. The whole end entire value of an expert is that you trust you can substitute their judgment for your own. If you won’t take their advice, get a different expert. If you find you can’t/won’t trust their advice, get a different expert.
$60 for a basic membership (2 account member cards). $120 is for an executive membership. As a one person household I do just fine with the basic. One pair of prescription eyeglasses saves more than the $60, plus there were those all-beef foot longs!
Whatever we had, it cost something extra, but not much. And was generally well worth the premiums paid most years.