Is shopping for dental insurance driving you crazy? If you are an accountant, engineer, realtor, architect, or financial consultant, and you’re self employed, I expect you’ve spent more time than you anticipated in crunching numbers and trying to justify health and dental insurance costs. Number crunching can be very difficult when it comes to health insurance because of all the variables that come into play. A random hip replacement or ruptured appendix is very difficult to budget for and the idea of self-insuring, probably doesn’t work within the self employed economic numbers of 2012. So for now keep those valuable Health Savings Accounts (HSA) in place and avoid the IRS by funding the account with those pre-taxed dollars.
Dental Care and Dental Insurance for Mathematicians.
Dental Question: How Much Are Americans Spending on Dental Care?
Last year Americans spend $106 billion on dental care. This was a combination of cleanings, x-rays, exams, filings, root canals, crowns, bridges, etc. In 2012 the estimated US population is 314 million. So let’s start crunching the dental numbers:
106,000,000,000 divided by 314,000,000 = $338 spent per a year per an American.
BUT, our numbers are including infants with no teeth, and elderly with no teeth, and all the small percentage of Americans that just ignore dental care completely, some even dying from no dental care. This number also ignores the poor people who simply get low cost extractions done and never get any proper procedures done to save a tooth.
Regardless we will stick with the average of $338 per a person. So the average cost of dental insurance in the US is only around $25 per a person per a month. Some basic Humana One dental policies can be as low as $13-$20 while other high quality United Health PPO policies cost around $25 a month. As you can see the annual premium is less than what the average American spends on dental care. Furthermore, probably the best statistic is that the average person who has dental insurance, will go to the dentist nearly twice as much as the person without dental coverage. Since most policies cover two cleanings per a year for free, policy holders are more inclined to make 2 appointments per a year.
Is Self Employed Dental Insurance Right for Me?
- I value my smile.
- I don’t want to have false teeth.
- My clients have nice teeth and I should too.
- I have good teeth and want to keep them healthy so I don’t have to get major dental work completed.
- I used to work in a corporation and had good dental insurance and want to have the same benefits.
- I realize that I only am alive once and would prefer to go through life with healthy teeth.
- Heart disease runs in my family and I understand I should avoid gum disease at all costs.
Keep that smile. Buy dental insurance for the self employed.