The Luxury of Dental Insurance

Jess Stoner has a fascinating and cringe-inducing essay on The Morning News about dental insurance, or lack thereof. She talks a little about the history of dental care (ancient Egyptians! Keri Russell!), her own experiences with uninsured dental care, and how we’re all basically screwed:

“During my first appointment, there were 20 of us in one large room, like a field hospital. The days of a private space where I didn’t have to watch an elderly man’s dentures get refit while my own mouth was tended to seemed like a heady dream. Listening to the whimpers of pained strangers, I learned an incredibly important lesson I have never forgotten: We’re all fucked.

Or to rephrase: “Tooth decay is the province of the poor.” Or perhaps, to add an addendum to that rephrase: “Tooth decay is also the province of the somewhat privileged whose shallow pockets are filled with advances on school loans.”

Jess points out that the number of people without dental insurance is three times that of those without health insurance. It seems that I hear of more and more people who work full-time and have health benefits but not dental, so this doesn’t surprise me. When did dental benefits become a luxury?

When it comes out of your own budget, as it would for many of us, writing off dental care, much less dental insurance, is easy to do. That is until you have any dental problem at all, as Jess Stoner recounts in her essay, and you end up either charging painful, hackneyed dental procedures to your credit card or living in pain for how many years until you give in and charge painful, hackneyed dental procedures on your credit card. God help us all.

I had dental insurance for the first time in years at my last job, and for some reason I elected to pay the extra $10-ish a month to upgrade to the fancy kind. This made me feel adult and secure in a purely abstract way, as it took me about a year to get around to making an appointment (my first dental appointment in over a decade, whoops) and I never went back.

Then when I left my job in May, my COBRA quote for dental insurance was $40/month which seemed reasonable, especially compared to the $761/month I’d have to pay to keep my health insurance. But when I thought about the fact that a cleaning costs, what, $100-$200, even at the fancy place I went to in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the spiky-haired, boyband dentist reviews your x-rays with you on an iPad. $40/month is $500 a year! Think of all the Madewell dresses I could buy with that money. I decided my cavity-free buck teeth and I would just pray nothing too bad happened to them.

And for those of you who are insured: go the dentist! Use your insurance! Luxuriate in your weirdly and unjustly unattainable benefits package. The rest of us will be over here diligently flossing for the first time in our lives, purely out of fear.

Photo: Kristine Paulus

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