Insurance

Dental insurance was brought into the market place into the late 60s and around 1970. And at that time the amount of money a dental insurance company would pay to an individual to have their mouth fixed ranged in the $1,500 area. At the same time, you could by a Boss Mustang for about $3,200. So fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money in 1970. Well, things have changed. A comparable Mustang today would cost somewhere around thirty two thousand dollars. But interestingly enough, dental insurance, the amount that a dental insurance company will pay to an individual a year is fifteen hundred dollars to two thousand dollars—in other words, for approximately 45 years, the amount a dental insurance company will pay to an individual has hardly changed at all.

It’s been affected by inflation. The cost of that Boss Mustang value is one tenth of what it would be today. And so your dental insurance policy is only worth one tenth of what it would have been worth in 1970. So the central reason why dental insurance policies are frustrating for everybody: they’re worth much less than people are led to believe they’re worth, because for over 45 years the cost of dental care or—medicine for that matter—have increased significantly. Most inflation in medicine and dentistry run in the five to ten percent range per year. We can see that in our medical insurance premiums as they go up ten percent or more each year.