Dental Appointment

Today I actually had a dental appointment scheduled for 10:30 am PST.  I was pretty excited about this appointment and made sure I was at the dental office located in Marina Del Rey on time.  Since I was a new patient I figured there would be a delay with the appointment time which there was.  This delay lasted a great deal longer than expected.  The lady at the front desk was extremely nice and kept apologizing on the wait.  Once they called my name and ushered me into the back room of the dental office I was scheduled to have x-rays performed on my teeth by a dental assistant.  I must admit the time it took to have the x-rays done was quite a pain and continually opening my jaw and tilting my head was quite annoying.  The lady that performed this procedure for me was sweet, so I shook it off.  Next was the wait for the dentist to actually see me, he came into the room, introduced himself and it was off to the races.  After looking in my mouth and determining that there was nothing wrong with my teeth he proceeded to tell me about “invisalign” and why it would be good for me to get it.  The only problem here was that he didn’t truly take the time to explain to me what invisalign actually was, but ended up handing me a brochure and a portable dvd player to listen to the promo.  All of a sudden I felt like I was in an infomercial.  He told me that while I watch this promo, that he would check on my insurance policy to see what they would cover in regards to this.  After the promo was over and sitting in the seat for quite a bit of time for him to come back, he enters the room with a quote sheet.  This sheet showed that invisalign would cost me $6,000 and my insurance would only cover $1,000 of this total.  At this point I am starting to look at my dentist more and more like a sales man, as he proceeds to mention that he is one of the top providers for the invisalign brand.  This made me feel even more uncomfortable and I told him that I would have to think about it.  He leaves the room and another lady comes in.  She is what I will refer to as the “closer.”  She asks me what I would like to end up signing up for.  I told her I would have to consult my mother and father about this first as they are both doctor’s.  She didn’t like this answer, plus I ended up telling her that I want to look into my medical insurance a little further to see if I could get complete coverage for such a service.  She proceeded to tell me that my insurance was great!  This made me really skeptical and I said I have to end up going and bolted towards the doorway.

My entire point for writing about this story is to show how poor our health care system here in the United States actually is.  It’s no different from buying a car on a used car lot!  I literraly felt like I was being taken advantage of the entire time, because no one seem to actually care about me as a person.  Anyhow, I am going to get back to work here and ponder a little more about what happened.

Regards,

Jason Thompson