Cost Savings
Significant Long-Term Savings
In the current climate of soaring health and dental care costs, dental health maintenance makes sense. It helps you meet the needs of employees while containing cost increases and utilization through a different delivery system.
Preferred Dental's goals are to ensure that employees see your plan as a positive change, and to reduce your dental costs. We work closely with you to design a dental program that satisfies your requirements and fits your existing plan design. In short, we can offer you a similar or better plan than what you have now, at as much as a 40% savings on your dental costs. This is a sustainable price advantage that we can guarantee for at least two years.
From an employer's perspective, the need for an alternative delivery system to the traditional dental plan has been evident for years.
How Can We Do This?
Preferred Dental is not an insurance provider.
We have converted an outdated, expensive model of benefit delivery into a defined contribution approach that reduces and stabilizes plan sponsor costs.
In our program, dentists and employees have an incentive to work together to reduce or eliminate major dental work, since the dentist assumes the primary financial risk.
You pay a flat, monthly (single or family) rate for each employee, which is passed on to the dentists. It's that simple!
Dentistry offers choices to the dentists and patients. A dental maintenance plan can strongly influence those choices by shifting the focus from treatment to prevention.
Preventive dental care keeps long-term costs down while enhancing employees' overall health. Regular checkups ensure that small problems are taken care of before they grow into costly conditions that contribute to absenteeism, decreased productivity and increased use of company drug plans for antibiotics and painkillers. A small cavity, for example, can be filled for $55. Left untreated, that same cavity might require extensive dental work costing upwards of $950 ($400 for a root canal, if the tooth abscesses, and then $550 for a crown).
Long-Term Benefits
Some U.S. studies show potential long-term savings of as much as 20% with a well-designed dental maintenance plan that provides the same benefit levels as a traditional plan. For example, one large company measured their dental maintenance plan versus a regular fee-for-service plan for three years.They found that dental maintenance plans:
- offered 20% more comprehensive benefits
- cost $90 less per year per employee than the regular dental plan
- had a three-year cost increase of 4%, while regular dental plan costs increased 27%
- cost the employee less in out-of-pocket expenses
- had more employees visiting the dentist
- had less dentist dissatisfaction and improved dental health of users
- and had large increases in the number of employees choosing the program.
No Claims Processing Charges
Under a traditional dental plan, you typically pay 5% to 10% (ASO) for claims processing. Since Preferred Dental is not an insurance company, but an intermediary with a network of dental clinics, we do not charge you to process claims. In fact, plan members do not even need to file claims for most of their dental needs.
Guaranteed Rates
The initial enrollment is for 24 months, and rates are guaranteed for 24 months. We guarantee that in the third year, fees will increase no more than the dental fee guide increase for that year. Therefore, this program gives you immediate cost savings, and an effective three-year price guarantee.
We partner with employers for the long-term. The dentist will invest extensively in your employees' oral health at the outset and provide ongoing, preventive care to deliver long-term cost savings.