this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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I lived in the US until a few years ago. I take daily ADHD medication and took birth control for several years, but not always. Otherwise, I was pretty healthy and didn’t have much medical intervention, but I have bad teeth.
I got the most cost effective insurance plan for me based on that medical history available at roughly $240 per two-week pay period, with a $5,000 deductible. The medication I took cost about $300/month and I had to pay for monthly drs visits and urine tests, to make sure I wasn’t abusing it. I don’t remember how much those cost, but I generally spent about $11k a year.
As a healthy (if neurodivergent) person in my 20s.
If I hadn’t had insurance, it would have been much more expensive, which is nuts. I got a tooth pulled and an implant put in, which cost about $8k all told, of which $2k was covered.
When I was in my early twenties, I got a chemical burn on my eye which required lots of treatments in the emergency room which I tried to pay, but there were twenty different places billing me for it and I just lost track of it. I had no assets and a bad job and they went into collections, but never showed up on my credit report and I essentially faced no consequences for doing so, except for much increased stress. If I had tried to do that with the tooth, they wouldn’t have given me the implant without upfront payment. If my payment had bounced, I had a better job and more money than earlier, so they might have tried to garnish my wages or sue me for payment.
Just going to mention here that a lot of countries with universal medical care don't include dental care, the UK being one of them I think.
That’s absolutely true. I’m now in Germany, where that’s the case, but it’s still a hell of a lot cheaper than $8k.
Which is frankly bullshit. Your teeth are absolutely capable of killing you if infected. I get not doing regular cleanings (shiny white teeth is a bit of a weird american-ism) but dental care is fucking inportant.
Not to mention the whole thing about how
people need to be able to eat!!!
I completely agree. Unfortunately it's a holdover from the earliest days of medicine, doctors differentiating themselves and their schools from both the barber-dentist tradition and midwifery. Humankind would have benefitted if they had shared training, techniques and knowledge (with oversight and testing of course). Bad dental health leads to (and can be a sign of) a lot of systemic illnesses.