Reply #18: Maybe you have to be "old" to know this, but.....

[Honeycombe8]

there was no widespread dental insurance until the last decade. The decade before, there was dental insurance, but not many people had it. Before then...I never even heard of dental insurance.

The reason is.....dental costs were minimal. Most people, unless you were poor, could pay for dental work easily out of pocket. An exam with x-rays and a cleaning was maybe $30-$50 (it's now about $200 here in Dallas TX).

For the things that were REALLY expensive, if you had them done in a hospital, regular medical insurance covered it. For example, when I was a teen, I had impacted wisdom teeth. All four had to be extracted. If I'd had it done at dentist...no coverage. My parent would've paid for it, since I couldn't have afforded it (I was still just 17, though). But because my teeth were impacted, they were able to put me in hospital and have an oral surgeon remove all four at once, so that my dad's med. insurance would cover it.

Why did costs of dental care go up? They went up commensurate with the popularity of dental insurance. The more that people got dental insurance, the higher the dentists' rates went.

20 years ago, most people going to a dentist did not have dental ins. NOW, the dentist office thinks you're weird if you DON'T have insurance. And they file the paperwork for you. A HUGE change in a small amount of time.

The same is true of some kinds of medical care, too. Used to be, pregnancy wasn't covered by medical insurance. It was really cheap, too. My friends and sister...the doctor's charge for pregnancy care for the whole 9 months was a flat figure of about $1,200. That included delivery. Plus patient would have to buy vitamins, and I guess the hospital rate for the delivery. Medical ins. only kicked in on the newborn after birth.

Enter insurance, which everyone was happy about. But of course, that meant that rates for pregnancy care skyrocketed, making is so expensive that everyone HAD to get health insurance just to be able to afford it.

Insurance. Whenever you have the insurance companies enter the picture, their profit comes from somewhere. Which means the health care workers have to increase their fees dramatically to get paid decently. Even now, I hate to hear that new things are going to be covered by insurance, like birth control. Everyone is always so happy about it. But I'm old enough to remember how that works, and what that means. That means the cost of birth control will skyrocket, making it unreachable for those w/o insurance. And making everyone's premiums go up. In the end, only the ins. companies are happy.