
Show HN: Disrupting dental insurance industry with in-house membership software - okdentalplans
https://www.okdentalplans.com
======
PaulHoule
Isn't dental insurance just a scam? It's a lot of money but then if you need a
root canal or something it only pays 50% so why?

~~~
okdentalplans
You're right. There's no insurance in dentistry. Insurance is an actuarial
risk analysis versus moral hazard. Everybody has car insurance but hopefully
everybody pays a premium and never ever make a claim. Everybody too has fire
insurance on their house.

But with dental insurance, you don't really have dental "insurance" when 100%
of the people need a cleaning, exam, and X-rays each year. In practice, it's
more akin to a Costco membership, where you pay a monthly premium in return
for discounted services. A co-pay is almost always necessary for basic
(filling)/major procedures (crown, root canal).

It's a huge pain point in dentistry, because insurance companies basically
monopolize dentistry ($85 billion market), where the vast majority of patients
pay money to the insurance companies, not directly to the dentists themselves.
In effect, dentists are reduced to being employees/contractors of these so-
called preferred plan organizations (PPOs).

But they have no choice, because if they don't "take" the insurance of any
patient calling in, they lose that business forever -- the patient just goes
to the next dentist who's "in network" and accepts their insurance.

So over time insurance commoditizes dentistry, patients have zero loyalty to
their providers (they have loyalty to their insurance instead) and these PPOs
have all the bargaining power to impose terms and provide lower and lower
reimbursements to dentists, while their costs go up year after year.

My MVP strives to empower dentists to start taking back their business from
insurance companies, to be their own "insurers." Start a competing in-house
discount plan and keep those monthly retainers for themselves.

~~~
tmamic
You are targeting dentists here, but patients are the ones buying the
insurance. Even patients often don't have a choice - think employee benefits
and medicaid/medicare.

Even if dentists do enroll in this, what happens when a patient decides to
change dentist?

