For 9 years I was subject to the military medical systems. Those of you that have been there know what I am talking about and for those of you who don’t I hope you never have to find out. High on my hate list were military dentists. From what I have learned, these are the guys that opted to have the military pay for their medial career and start them off. Often times the “dentists” are still studying to get their degrees and use the military members as class subjects. Now I know that my teeth are not in the greatest shape, but the first time I had gone in to a military dentist, I was thrown on a schedule that involved me going back at least once a month for upwards around 2 years. This was still very early in my military life so I was very gullible. Since that time I was subject to 6 total root canals and have enough metal bonded to my teeth that I really should be setting off detectors at the airports.
In my later military life I learned to despise the dentists and would find reasons to cancel the appointments with no reasonable reschedule date. Sadly, this hatred has carried over to my post military life. I have been out of the uniform for 2 years now and have just gotten to a dentist yesterday. Mostly this is because I really needed to go. You see, one of the “fillings” that was installed a few years ago broke. I have a nasty gap in the side of my mouth. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s annoying as all heck. I have dental insurance through my work so I figured that it was time to take care of it. I called up a dentist in the local area and made an appointment. When I arrived, the office was very nice and the personnel were very friendly. The Dentist went through and too a Time Magazine photo spread of my mouth and started pointing out all of my problem areas. Everything about the visit was going great……until…….
Once the exam was finished it was time to discuss how we were going to schedule this out. Obviously the cracked tooth was priority, and there were 2 other teeth right near it that needed work too. They claim that they only do work on quadrants at a time so they would do the whole upper right side and after insurance is taken care of that leaves only $4000 that I would have to cover.
Excuse me?
Yup, apparently my insurance only covers about $1200 a year which means anything over that is out of my pocket and this one procedure was going to be F-ing expensive. Even talking them down to just working on that one tooth and filling the gap made it around $1000 out of pocket. This was where I started to get sick. There was no way I could afford something like that. I scheduled what little I could and walked out in disgust. On the way home I stopped by a little hole in the wall dentist office and asked them some questions. They made me feel a little better as I learned that the dentist I went to was VERY expensive and that this other office could do the work for quite a bit less. But it still wasn’t cheap.
So here I am, out $200 off my insurance yearly amount for that first exam, a gap still in my teeth, a mouth full of metal, and still a sick feeling in my gut. The military dentists did a lot of crazy stuff to my teeth, but maybe they weren’t so bad after all. At least while I was in, they were free.
Yesterday really just spiraled down from there. Needless to say, I crashed out early.
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