Congrats, in 2021, all your patients with insurance will be receiving a $10,000 annual maximum!!! They can now afford to replace that missin #9. Put the crown on that broken #29. Or even just getting all the cavities filled from a few years of neglect.
And yet, here we are with insurance annual maximum benefits sticking to a flat $1,000 – $2,000. One of the few constant reminders of when dental insurance first started 50 years ago. Richard Nixon at the time is in office. Gas costed ya 36 cents. A brand new car you were filling with that gas, came in at $3,542 dollars. And you came home to your newly built home which set you back for a decent $26,600.
And here you are increasing your UCR by 2-3% on all your fee’s for the last 50 years to keep up with the dreaded INFLATION. A maximum dental benefit of $1,000 would’ve bought you a heck of a lot of dentistry 50 years ago. 50 years later, inflation has spun on to an accumulated total of 571% since then. The maximums back then bought you 6 times as many fillings, crowns and extractions.
All of us frogs are in this slowly boiling vat. And only the lucky ones, who feel a sense of urgency will make the leap out. 
Inflation is the insidious fire that wipes away our buying power without setting a flame to a single item in our home. Every dollar you’ve earned has been incorporated with a slow burn fuse. Nibbling away at first the edges, further in, you don’t notice it until there is not much semblance of the bill you once held.
I think as a dentist, we are already too busy to involve ourselves with the quarrels of politics and big insurance.
At this point, there is no way out unless we have a concerted effort to band together and elect to not use any of these dental practice terrorizing PPO insurances. It’ll take at least 60-80% of all existing practices to stop taking these insurances all together before reform or change would eventually be seen.
Something as simple as inflation should make most patients reconsider what it is they’re truly paying with each monthly premium. I’m not talking about the lack of dentistry they will be receiving with their sh*tty coverage either. Delta Dental, considered a non-profit from what I could scrounge from a 2018 File 990-O (the organization is exempt from income tax) pay 20% of their expenses to CEO’s and directors of the company. In comparison, other comparative dental insurance companies on average are closer to 3-6%. 
As a patient, your premiums are also paying for approximately a billion dollars worth of investments Delta Dental sits on. In their fiscal 2018 year, it must’ve not been a great investment year as they had managed to lose approximately 100 million dollars. Should’ve bought some bitcoin…
Anyways, I could wax and wane all about how grimy dental insurance is with their other tactics of dictating care, claim stalling, hidden deductible fee structures, pre-existing conditions clauses, waiting period mumble jumble or just ludicrous paperwork and information barriers they put up. Instead we should be focus on becoming a tighter knit group.
Informing our fellow dentites and patients the egregious act that is boiling all of us in the same vat. Our ADA and local Dental Association needs to hear from us. We should be engineering elections to one of our own, and kicking out the ones with ties and kickbacks from big insurance.
And yet greed will always be the fall of the mighty. The tragedy of those who are not willing to thrive.
Stay well my friend,
Lam