How do so many lower income families afford braces for their teens?
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Anonymous
| I never went for a dental cleaning as a kid. My parents were not low income, but they are immigrants working for small businesses and they did not have dental insurance for any of us, so we only went to the dentist when there was actual pain/a cavity. |
Anonymous
I think this is far more common than many people realize. |
Anonymous
I used to be a waitress and worked with some early 20s ladies that had had their children as literal teens and were on Medicaid. They still took those kids for teeth cleaning. |
Anonymous
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I know this thread kind of died but I'm in the midst of figuring out braces for my kid and was thinking about this thread. We are not low income, more middle income (around 140k HHI) but not wealthy like so many on this board.
Braces are really not that dramatic of a cost. Virtually all orthodontists offer payment plans and the per month cost is reasonable even on a lower income (we are looking at various orthodontists ranking from $175/mo to 2=$290/mo, with different lengths of plans and different down payment amounts). We also have access to an FSA through work, which we can combine with the payment plan to bring the out of pocket cost down further (we figure anything we buy with an FSA, we are getting at a 30% discount). We also may be able to get up to $2000 paid by our insurance if we use the right one, which can be tricky. We would also have to switch to a more expensive dental insurance, though the cost per pay is like an extra $8 every two weeks. We are government employees so yes dental insurance is offered at a decent rate. I was stressed about the cost of braces when I started looking into it and when I first saw the price estimates at various orthodontists, but coworkers and the orthodontists themselves are really helpful in helping to navigate this stuff and making sure we're maxing out our benefits and and making it affordable. Very few child expenses are like that. This has been an unusually pleasant experience in that regard. It seems like people kind of go out of their way to make orthodontia more accessible to people at different incomes. As someone who should have gotten braces for both serious bite issues and aesthetic reasons (severe crowding and overlap), I really wanted to do this for my kid so she could feel confident in her smile. I'm really glad we can find an affordable way to do it. it might mean taking smaller vacations next year or putting off some house maintenance, but nothing dramatic. I think it's very worth it. |
Anonymous
Yeah, that’s where she’s coming from. What was middle class is getting eaten alive and it’s only getting worse. It’s especially noticeable around here, because the expenses and taxes for everything are obscene and increasing. Even more so if you have kids. You can’t compete. |
Anonymous
My kids' braces were about $3000 each, over the course of 18 months. In DC. And that included all appointments, any brackets that needed to be adjusted/re-glued etc. I always assumed Invisilign was cheaper? Eesh. |
Anonymous
| Why do you care? Are you paying for them ? |
Anonymous
They do not pay for it unless it is so extreme that the child will suffer greatly. Medicaid normally will not pay for any of it. |
Anonymous
Find me one criminal case where dentists are charged with Medicaid fraud for giving braces to hundreds of patients. It's open season. They can claim anything to rationalize it being a "medical issue." Some of the ritziest neighborhoods have degree mill orthos living like kings off Medicaid patients. |
Anonymous
Yes, it's called income taxes. |
Anonymous
| It's not true that it has to be extreme. But I doubt orthodontists are getting rich off Medicaid rates, generally Medicaid pays less for a service than private insurance does. |
Anonymous
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In college in the early 00s my freshman year a lot of the financial aid minority kids suddenly had braces after winter break. I know they were financial aid because I was in an first-gen working class orientation with them. It was like they all learned of some way to get braces paid for as dozens of them suddenly had braces that January.
There was also a scandal while I was in college that college students, from rich, middle class, to poor, were knowingly scamming state food stamp cards by filling out forms locally as single adults with technically poverty solo income. That scam spread like wildfire. It lastly maybe a year or two before the state banned college students from filling out the apps like that. If such a food stamp scam can spread like wildfire among college kids, I imagine a way to get free $7000-10,000 orthodontia work would too. |
Anonymous
They're mostly certainly still billing Medicaid thousands of dollars. That's better than the $0 they'd collect from these patients otherwise. |
Anonymous
NP. You’re so close to being able to figure this out, little buddy |
Anonymous
| Mine was $2500 and dental insurance paid 1k. This was in 2021. It just wasn’t that expensive IMO. |