What Makes Dental Care So Expensive?

Some people balk at the price of dental care. To be sure, you may end up paying thousands of dollars for major restorative work, but it’s important to remember that this is a medical treatment, and investing in your teeth can make the difference between keeping them for a lifetime and losing them one by one at an early age.

There are good reasons for the cost of dental care. Here are a few of them.

Dental Care Cannot Be Mass Produced (and Done Properly)

The reason why many costs have gone down in our society is that many things can be churned out by a factory or otherwise sold at a volume discount. This can’t be done with dental care. It requires the dedicated attention of a highly educated and highly talented individual. Dental restorations have to be custom-made for your mouth and properly fitted, which takes time. These individuals are in demand, which drives the cost of service up.

A dentist that tries to run an assembly-line practice will spend less time with each patient and may be cheaper, but may also not deliver the same quality care.

Overhead Costs

Running a modern dental practice requires many expenses, from the rent for the office space to the payroll of the professionals that assist the dentist, to supplies for the dental and office sides of the practice. Providing high-quality care also means investing in technology, which can be expensive. Dentists are also trying to pay off the cost of their education for many years after graduating. The average student loan debt for a dentist is more than $221,000. Add all these factors together and your “high” dental bill yields a relatively small margin.

Lab Costs

Another expense that dentists incur is the cost to have restorations crafted by their lab. They want to make sure they’re providing a quality restoration that will fit properly and not break, which can be expensive.

Dental Insurance Gives Limited Coverage

If you’ve ever looked at your doctor’s bill and compared the “with insurance” and “without insurance” prices, you’ve probably noticed that a 75% discount is not unusual, and sometimes the discount may be as much as 90%. Dental insurance is different. It’s more like a program designed to encourage you to get preventative dental care. It covers mostly routine cleanings and other preventive care, and the benefits reach their maximum quickly.

In many cases, dentists are happy to give discounts to people who work without insurance, because they don’t like working with it themselves.

You Can Help Control Costs

Although dentists don’t like dental insurance much, they will agree with it about one thing: preventive care is of the utmost importance. The better you do with preventive care, such as making your routine dental visits and performing your oral hygiene at home, the less likely you are to need major, expensive procedures.

And it’s worth noting that when it comes to dental care, there are a range of prices you will encounter, but in many cases, you will get what you pay for.

At Nicolas A. Ravon, DDS, MSD, we charge fees that are appropriate to the quality of care that we deliver. We invite you to see for yourself the care that we deliver, and you will see that our fees are appropriate.

To schedule your appointment, please contact Nicolas A. Ravon, DDS, MSD in Beverly Hills today.

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