Paying for your dental treatment out-of-pocket. - Cash discounts / Prioritizing dental work.

Paying for dental services out-of-pocket, either up front or else on a pay-as-you-go basis, may not seem as though it offers any real monetary advantage. But there can be aspects of this payment method that can be beneficial to your financial health.

» Ask your dentist if they provide a cash discount for treatment plans that are paid for in full before the dental work is performed.

If you've been presented with a sizeable treatment plan, you might just go ahead and ask your dentist if they have a policy where they give a discount if the dental work is paid for in a lump sum in advance. You very well may be turned down. But besides the obvious benefit this arrangement has for you, it can provide a number of advantages for your dentist too.

As an example, the workload for the dentist's front desk staff will be minimized. Each time you are in they won't have to ask you for payment. Your account won't have any need for mailed statements or accounts receivable monitoring. And, of course, there is no chance that your completed dental treatment will go unpaid.

Additionally, the dentist may find that they have fewer broken appointments with those patients who have paid for their work in advance. And during any one of the patient's appointments, if extra time presents itself the dentist can feel free to go ahead and complete additional treatment rather than having to stay within the patient's budget.

» If the cost of your dental needs is prohibitive, ask your dentist about prioritizing your treatment.

A dentist's first order of business with any new dental patient will be to create a treatment plan. During the patient's examination the dentist will collect all pertinent information and from this data devise a treatment plan that lists those dental procedures that will be required to bring the patient to proper oral health.

The ordering of the individual procedures in the patient's treatment plan will reflect the urgency with which they need to be addressed. Usually most of a patient's work will be of a nature where it can be scheduled at the convenience of the patient and dentist. But some procedures will need to be assigned more urgency and will need to be completed promptly so to prevent further deterioration of the patient's teeth and gums.

These relatively more urgent dental procedures will typically be associated with either a functional or social disability. As examples, clearly those treatments that address dental pain or acute infection should be placed at the head of a person's treatment plan. But so should dental work involving teeth with large cavities, teeth requiring extraction, cases of suspected cancer or even disfiguring conditions such as those cases where the patient's front teeth are badly compromised.

Any dentist should be able to identify in their treatment plan that general breakpoint where the treatment begins its transformation from a state of urgency to one of more moderate, and less pressing, need. The idea is, once this point has been reached the patient's dental visits can be scheduled less frequently, possibly even significantly so, thus spreading their expenses out over a longer, more affordable, time frame.

» Give your dentist as much information as possible about your plans.

This approach can even be taken a step further, if you just inquire and make the appropriate adjustment to the treatment plan with your dentist. With some types of dental work more than one treatment option might exist. Typically one will offer benefits that the other does not (more lasting, greater protection for the tooth, is more aesthetically pleasing, etc...) but is also more costly. If you will discuss matters with your dentist (give them an idea of what you consider the preferred treatment and a time frame in which its expense might be affordable for you), they can make plans to augment your treatment plan as is most beneficial for you.

A common example is one where the dentist places a large filling in a tooth now, with the understanding that the patient will opt for a dental crown as soon as it is financially possible. But even more to the point, if the dentist knows a fairly precise time frame over which the alternative treatment must serve they may be able to devise yet another, even less expensive, solution (especially if the time frame is relatively short). So, with this dental crown example, placing a temporary filling in the tooth, placing a temporary dental crown, or recementing a dislodged existing dental crown might each provide a not-ideal-yet-serviceable solution for the time period in question.