Why is it that you can pay here in the US with cash and save over going through insurance.
The reason is when a third party is involve the extra hands in the pie make it impossible to keep cost down.
I no longer have dental insurance and when I did the insurance was billed $225 for basis cleaning...now that I pay it by myself it is $140 for the same service...that is a 60% increase with insurance!!
Originally Posted by bb1961
Yes, it is definitely a quirk in the system due largely to the bureaucracy and the overhead. A lot of it started with the older Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement schedules of getting paid 80% of what was billed so billings then got inflated to increase reimbursement amounts. Lately, it's gone down to more of a standard reimbursement schedule for Medicare/Medicaid which ends up setting base cash prices and also what get's billed to insurance.
I don't know the circumstance of your dental insurance, but if it was a participating provider in your plan regardless of what was billed, the reimbursement was probably far less. If not participating or your plan didn't have participating doctors then it probably wasn't a very good plan and you should have dropped it before.
But in regards directly to the OP, yes, the US system is currently screwed up with a hybrid government control approach for part of the market and free market profitable companies for the rest. Obamacare tried to take more of that into government control, but was certainly not the right approach.