It’s the same in the US.
I think that originally the perception of dental work was that it was basically cosmetic except for the tooth pulling. It wasn’t “really health” Obviously this is wrong, but much of why we know this is wrong is because of what we’ve learned in the past 50 years or so about the relation between dental and medical health.
IANA dentist, but my understanding is that there’s one major difference between dentistry and every other field of medicine: tooth enamel doesn’t grow back once it’s been damaged. Thus, there’s much more importance placed on preventive care, and repairing damage to teeth is more akin to reconstructive surgery than to (say) stitching up a wound. (How this affects insurance, I have no idea.)
The people who do the data entry in the billing department have a higher rate of turnover… everyone wants less expensive healthcare and one of the ways to do that is to pay minimum wages in that department. There’s 2-3 people doing the work load for several people. Squeeze that nickel hard enough to make the buffalo shit!
I expect health insurance to cover what it says it will cover. Basically, all things that are not elective/cosmetic (for instance, plastic surgery for beauty shouldn’t be covered.)
None of this “We don’t cover fractures because yours was a compound fracture, not a fracture” BS.
You need to read thru your insurance EOC (Evidence of Coverage) to see the finer details - I can guarantee you it won’t say “everything except elective/cosmetic stuff”. There are tons of details of what is covered and what’s not covered. Typical EOC will be tens of pages long and reads like legal-ease. Most people never crack it open to read it until they are denied something, and the insurance can say “See! We told you in the EOC that thing wasn’t covered!”
That does make dentistry, especially the hygienist and cosmetic aspects, I suppose, a bit of an outlier, but I still think it’s weird that acute dental care is not a core medical service
Just to expand on this: one time I woke up with a severe pain in my upper jaw area. I made an appointment to see the doctor, who said it might be a tooth problem. I made an appointment to see the dentist, who took x rays and poked around a bit and could find no evidence of a dental issue and suggested I go back to the doctor. I did that and eventually got referred to the Ear, Nose and Throat team, who examined me and treated me for a suspected sinus problem.
I get that medical diagnosis isn’t a perfect thing, but the centimetre-precise location of pain in your head shouldn’t require you to decide which of two entirely different medical services you need to approach.
Political reality, as with GPs. The only way to get dentists, GPs and opticians to participate in the NHS in the first place was to let them stay independent but contracted with the NHS for some or all of their time.
Likewise the senior hospital doctors’ contracts allow some proportion of their time (IIRC 2/11) on private practice or other outside professional activity.
There are a lot of medical plans that include eye exams as part of their preventative care along with yearly physicals, gynecological exams, ect., etc. My medical plans includes a yearly eye exam, but it won’t cover things like contacts or glasses, so I’m also enrolled in the vision plan.