Dental implants are usually very expensive, and not many insurance companies cover such a procedure.

My grandmother wore dentures right from the time she was 70. People don’t usually lose all their teeth until they are 85 or so; but my grandmother had a rare form of periodontal problem that ran in her family. She didn’t wear dentures for long. She would speak and her teeth would embarrassingly slide back and forth; eating was a problem, and cleaning and maintaining them was the most disgusting chore,she felt. And then, she said she couldn’t take it anymore and her three children decided to chip in together to get her something better – dental implants. Most people don’t have the kind of problems my grandmother had with her dentures; still, dental health experts point to implants as the greatest thing.

Implants would be all over the place if they were not so hideously expensive. The dentist drills a titanium screw where the tooth is expected to stand, and then fixes a prosthetic tooth into it. That sounds pretty straightforward; you never need to maintain them, you never need to clean them, they never break, and they’re like a bionic set of teeth. But why on earth should they be $50,000 for a mouthful of teeth? Of course, insurance companies would never pay for such a thing – nothing over a nominal thousand dollars or so. They are expensive, because there are so many teeth to take care of, and each implant requires a dentist and a surgeon to be present. But these are a wonderful investment; the wearer never has to bother about their dental health anymore, and they last a lifetime with zero maintenance work.

Getting bridgework done could be an option of course; but in bridgework, the dentist typically has to abrade the teeth adjacent to the one he’s replacing to make room for the new tooth. And that kind of grinding action typically compromises your dental health way too much. It’s virtually a guarantee that about five years after getting bridgework done, that you will need root canaling on both the ground teeth. Over the long run, bridgework actually ends up costing more than an implant. However, replacing all your teeth with dental implants does cost at least 20 times as much as dentures, and that is a problem that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Your dental insurance company will usually balk at the costs involved in such a procedure; if this is the case, you can ask them to contribute to the procedure what they would pay for bridgework or some other conventional solution. And if you go to a network dental health clinic, you can get as much as 95% off on the standard pricing. All you need to do is ask your dentist for his in-network pricing. Most dentists will be a little understanding and do their best to help with your budget. Some dentists will even personally extend financing to you. Apart from that, you can try medical financing with Wells Fargo Health Advantage or with other places. And the interest can be very affordable. One of the best options you have is to visit a clinic attached to a dental school. They will have dentists in training who will perform the procedure on you at a substantial discount. Check out OralHealthAmerica.org for more details.

The changes are hardly trivial. Health insurance policy holders in a handful of states across the country have been receiving notifications from their insurance companies that they can expect to pay perhaps 15% more on their policies, for the same service.

One health insurance company in Maine, Anthem Blue Cross is jacking up its rates nearly 23%, and is getting a lot of hate mail from local representatives and customers. That’s not as bad as what they did in California – the sunny state saw nearly twice that kind of escalation. And in Oregon, people got hit with a 25% hike last year, and can expect something like that this year too. All this happens mainly to people who buy their own personal policies, instead of going through the companies they work for. Bulk purchasers, like employers, see some kind of reason prevail. If insurance companies are not reasonable, the employer will walk with his hundreds of potential customers. All of this could be an incidental effect of how the insurance companies lost thousands of customers over the past year – customers who could no longer afford cover, now that they don’t have jobs. Affordable individual health insurance is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Right away, people can expect to be paying a third more on individual policies, says the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. If this gets your back up and gets you planning the vitriol you’ll pour down in your letter to your Congressman, you’re out of luck. The government doesn’t really have enough power, dictating prices. But there certainly is going to be plenty of table pounding at state legislatures. It’s not that the health insurance companies don’t see how difficult they are making it for families to get access to health care. For a family of three, that works out to something like $1300 a month. In several states, consumer protection groups our putting together major protest rallies; and they should. Once access to affordable individual health insurance is taken away, where does that leave us? And since the insurance companies understand the situation from our point of view, they do support President Obama’s health care reform, now hopelessly stalled. They want some kind of system that can help everyone in the country be covered too. If lots of people drop out of the system like they are doing now, the companies have no choice but to spread their losses among other existing customers.

Still, the government in Maine, rejected some of the health insurance companies rate increases; after negotiations, they brought it down to 11% or so. And the health insurance companies are suing the state. The company argues that they aren’t doing this for some kind of obscene profit. They claim that they can barely stay above water as it is. In Kansas too, insurance companies are raising their rates by a third. Mostly, the governments are falling in line behind these demands. They do agree that the cost of taking care of people is rising, and one can’t expect these companies to not pass on those costs to the customer. Basically, anything between 10% and 25% is what we need to expect. Just one more effect of the recession.