People who have good teeth and access to dental care don't realize what a huge problem this is.  Your teeth can affect your health, even kill you.  And having your teeth look bad is a huge impediment to not only your social life and well-being, but to your ability to be gainfully employed.  

Who wants to hire someone with rotten or missing teeth?  You can't put that shit out there in front of the public!  And what choices do the people have?

I must be unemployable then! by far the majority of my teeth are plastic.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

My dentist charges $80 for cleaning.  Had a tooth filled today.  $110 if I went amalgam or $180 if I wanted epoxy.  I'd have paid your bills to avoid having to sit in that chair, but that's another story.

Took him roughly an hour with an assistant there the whole time.  Wild ass guess that materials were $30-50 including the novocaine(sp?).  Say $25-30 for the assistant for an hour with benefits (health care mandatory for full timers in HI) so he might have made $100-120/hr gross to cover rent/office staff insurance etc.  Doesn't seem too outrageous to me.  

 We've no dental cover but the programs we've had in the past from recent employers would have only paid about half.  We live in one of the most expensive places in the US for most things so this isn't Tijuana pricing.  The days of Big Business paying 80%+ are long past for us.

Hard to see how you got to $6000 for one extraction and "a few" cavities.  Might want to shop around for a new dentist.

Agree that health care in the US is a disaster for the lower middle class on down.  We need a single payer system.

My Iranian colleague was quoted privately £6,000 ($12,000, near enough) in London (where it is literally impossible to get on an NHS list these days) for some crowns etc.

On a visit to Teheran, he had the work done by a top flight dentist (and Iranian doctors and dentists are pretty good, although there is a shortage of top class kit).

$250

Maybe Ahmadinejad could start the "Give the US a smile" campaign". It would certainly appeal to his perverse sense of humour.


"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

In many parts of Britian it is almost impossible to find a dentist who will provide NHS dental care (nb which is not free). So most people have insurance. Fortunately it is pretty affordable, mine is about £30 a month. Alright that's a lot for people on low wages, but it means that those of us who can don't clog up the queue for those that can't.

Course that doesn't mean I don't want a proper nhs funded dental service. I'm far too familiar with the stories such as yours, Izzy, to feel complacent about where we are going. The NHS is being accounted to death, one cheapskate slice at a time.

keep to the Fen Causeway

my childhood dentist was a harley street alky playboy with way more charm than skill, with the cuttingly (sorry!) accurate name of Kenneth Little.

i didn't get the joke till about 20 years later, when my teeth were in sad shape, and i became practised at sublimating dental pain.

we drank rainwater in hawaii, which is about as low in minerals as distilled water, and all the pineapples, tangerines etc were taking their toll, too.

i found calcium supplements to be useful, i must have tried at least 20 types, ranging from oyster shell powder (hard on the kidneys) to my final choice, chelated calcium-magnesium made from yeast.

i used to eat them like candy.

then i read about mercury poisoning, amalgam and the long history of controversy about it.

i started looking for dentists who were aware of this, and was laughed out of many an office.

eventually finding one, he measured the mercury in my urine and i slowly started having the amalgam fillings replaced with ceramic.

there was an immediate improvement, and over the next 5 years, i had them all replaced. since then, 13 years with almost no problems, i am so grateful. many people have had all sorts of ailments cured by removing the amalgam, from heart disease to cancer.

the water in italy is very good, and calcium supplementation is no longer necessary. completely allergic to sugar for years, now i can handle it, in moderate amounts, though i eat as little as possible.

i have a hunch stem cell tech is going to enable us to grow new teeth, even late in life. i read of teeth bud transplants working, ($30,000 a pop!) way back in the 80's, but they would be rejected by the new host-mouth after 20 years. not ideal, but better than some solutions.

the combination of low sunlight and a high sugar diet have made english teeth notorious worldwide for their crumbliness.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

A few years ago we visited Turkey on business.  In Istanbul two of our travel mates began to experience a lot of pain with their teeth.  Both had recently had root canals in the US and these were the very teeth that were in pain.  The American consulate recommended an American trained, English speaking Turkish dentist.  Both visited the same dentist and each were told that their previous procedures had only been partially completed, some nerve remained, thus the pain.  A root canal is supposed to destroy the nerve so there should have been no pain for either person.  They had each paid dearly for the complete procedure, but apparently it was botched.  Long story short, both received excellent care in Istanbul (root canals completed).  They both had crowns made in Ankara when we continued our journey. One person told me he had never been in a dentist office in the US that was as clean and well-equipped as the office in Ankara.  Costs were less than half those paid in the US and they probably paid a premium compared to typical Turkish costs for similar work.  The other person told me he was considering having his whole mouth done there.  We agreed that Turkey is a nice holiday and when combined with dental work, the holiday could be considered free due to the low cost of dental care.

I have personally had dental care in Mexico, Switzerland, and Estonia. Each experience was generally good and at much less cost than for similar care in the US.  In fact, one broken tooth had been repaired five times in the US over a couple of years before a Swiss dentist repaired it in 1990.  It hasn't needed repair again since that date.  To be fair, I have had decent care in the US.  Our current dentist does not recommend extravagant work, but costs are still high.  It's easy to see how $6,000 could accumulate.  One root canal and crown can easily cost $1,600 - $2,000, and extractions are ridiculously expensive.  An extraction used to be the least costly thing one could do.  Now, it requires a specialist. Our dentist doesn't even do them.

I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears

Five or six years ago, I was visiting my mother who was, at that time, living in one of the poorer regions in the piney backwoods of Florida... [During] the course of the visit, I noticed that my mother's old TV seemed about to expire, so I decided to buy her a new one. The only place such a purchase could be made, however, was at a Wal-Mart store some 15 miles from where she lived.

The young woman who waited on me wore the ubiquitous red smock worn by Wal-Mart "associates" from coast to coast. She was probably 24 or 25, but she looked at least two decades older, her years already marked by the hardscrabble existence she'd known. Her teeth were bad, her complexion sallow. She was overweight as a result of a bad and unhealthy diet, and her speech was marred by the kind of bad grammar that attaches itself to poor people everywhere.

But, as they say in the south, she was sweet as pie, and as helpful as she could be without knowing much about the products she was selling.

I bought a TV and I gave it to Mom just before flying home to California, 3,000 miles from that Florida Wal-Mart, where there are identical Wal-Mart stores sprinkled hither and yon, places where women like the one who sold me Mom's TV grind out a living at dead end jobs that ensure they will never be able to get their teeth fixed because those jobs don't offer much in the way of hope or health care.

There are procedures (like the deep cleaning you mention, Izzy, which I think is called root planing) that are useful to have done at least once in midlife, that are not covered here. A number of other useful surgical procedures are not covered either. In the false teeth department, implants are not covered.

The national insurance system keeps the standard dental care rates low, with the result that dentists count on false teeth to make money. Prices are high compared to a lot of people's income, and most of the cost has to come out of pocket. The result is that people put things off till later, then find they're of course in a worse state and the costs will be even higher. And certainly, I see plenty of people past 40-50 whose teeth need attention or whose false teeth look really bad. This is, I think, one of the major failings of national health insurance in France. And (since it's not a recent problem, it goes way back) the social results can be seen.

However, my father has had several large jobs done over the years (crowns, bridges, etc) and I remember one time (and it was years ago) he must have paid maybe €2,500 for the whole thing.

When I was in the US as a graduate student our mandatory health insurance plan included dental coverage, and I don't remember simple jobs like cleaning or fillings being all that expensive. But once I heard of a bigger job (from someone who wasn't a student, but who had insurance) and it was close to $1,000 for fixing a broken tooth or something like that. This is all from 2000-4 so it may be quite dated.

But $12,000? That seems rather excessive.

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo