Wednesday, November 23, 2011

The long awaited Dental Update

I'm sure by now you have all read about our dental nightmare here (a top ten post actually)... and then the shocker of us discovering we were being horrendously overcharged here & here and then our decision to fight it out with the insurance company here.

Well after 30 business days, I have fantastic news.

While the dental office might not owe me directly any money for overcharges from dental work i've had done in the course of 5 years, they sure got their bad office practice behinds handed to them by the insurance company for SCB!

When I first started to read through the letter regarding SCB i was a bit nervous. It started out without any credits to our favor and actually had us owing more money to the Dentist at one point.
  • The first filling was correctly billed for $65.00 & while we are still not sure why he needed to have 2 Labial Veneers put in instead of fillings on 2 of his teeth, we where correctly charged $160 & $140 for them... so again, no refund there.
  • But then but another filling was originally billed for $65.00 but should have been billed for $75.00 so then we ended up owing $10.00 more.
But then the silver lining came. 

That "desenstizing" they charged my husband at $115 a tooth times 2 was refunded in full and should have been included at no additional charge from the beginning.

We were $220 in the green.

Then they had to deal with the 3 ceramic onlays that they strong armed us into at $796 a pop (that's after they dropped the price down from the original $850+ dollars a pop when they had our incorrect insurance file.)

Apparently because the dental office could not document and prove that they told us we could have cheaper options and materials (which they really couldn't document because they told us we weren't allowed to use that material in my husbands mouth at all... even though it was much cheaper then the name brand material because the doctor wouldn't put it in even if we wanted it...) So, the insurance company sided on our behalf and agreed that we should only have to pay the out of pocket co-pay for upgrading away from metal... which ment $165 a tooth...

So that meant they over charged us $1,713.00 for the onlays alone. Add in our desensitizing reimbursement and they have to refund our account $1,933.00

let me say it again folks, they owe us:
$1,933.00

Which means my husbands top mouth dental work only cost us $935.00 since he declined the deep cleaning since they wouldn't do it without adding $400 worth of medications. We instead chose to buy him an electric tooth brush with a built in 2 minuet timer to use until January when we change dentists and can get the fillings on his lower bottom teeth fixed.

They have 35 business days from the date of the letter to place the credit to our account which means the credit should be placed on our loan by the end of the year Since our letter was dated early November!!!!!!

Looks like well be having a Happy & Merry Christmas after all! I even think my Roth IRA wants to throw a party in my honor!

6 comments:

  1. That's awesome! What a sketchy dentist though.

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  2. Oops..I forgot to mention in my previous post that I bought my own domain name! When you have a chance, could you please update the links to my blog to show: http://www.thehappyhomeowner.net/

    Thanks!!

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  3. Do you plan on returning to this dentist?

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  4. that's the hard part ND Chic... We had issues with the billing people, not necessarily with the dentist... who was nice and gentle (we have different ones in the same office) so im not sure... and now that they know i'll double and triple check them on everything it might be wise to stay then have to do it all over again with them.

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