Last week I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a dental patient.<\/p>\n
A tooth on the right side of my mouth was aching. Had I become a teeth grinder overnight? Had a beetle crawled into my mouth?<\/p>\n
The familiar misery followed. Hot drinks sending me through the ceiling; pleading for an emergency appointment with the nice people at my dentist; X-rays, prodding and the lamentable news \u2014 a suspected dying tooth. A probable root canal. And \u2014 a new experience! A trip to see someone called an endodontist.<\/p>\n
Friends made the “ka-ching!” sound of a cash register when I told them my plight. Money. Dentists and all associated specialists mean money. Lots of it.<\/p>\n
My metamorphosis was going to be into a mendicant.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Two million Australians are skipping or delaying dental care due to the cost. (ABC News: Peter Drought)<\/p>\n
Should I be stuffing these premiums under my pillow?<\/p>\n
Through a series of decisions made over the years, alarmed here and there by government tinkering, levies and disincentives, as well as my husband’s bouts of illness, we now pay premiums to a private health fund for their most gold-plated product. To make us feel better about it, I’m sure, they even call it “gold” cover, but I’m afraid claim amounts come to us in tin.<\/p>\n
The monthly premiums, which we are lucky to be able to afford, are staggering, and as is well telegraphed each year by an apparently struggling health insurance sector, they increase annually and by an amount never matched by their customers in a wage increase of their own.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Weekend Reads in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n Start your weekend with the best of the ABC’s journalism, presented by Virginia Trioli. Discover compelling features, big ideas and revealing analysis to understand the stories that matter to Australians.<\/p>\n But I apparently have the cover for this kind of specialist, so off I went, to a surgery of such impeccable cleanliness and order that we could have given me a quick face lift while I was there.<\/p>\n My endodontist \u2014 I hesitate to write “my” given I’ve only known him for 25 minutes, but he’s had his hands all up in my mouth, and I paid him for it, so we must have some kind of relationship \u2014 narrowed his eyes at me when I wondered how much I might get back from my fund for the service. He said, almost word for word, what any number of health care professionals and front-of-office staff have told me for decades: “If you took those monthly premiums and put them under your pillow instead of paying for insurance, you could pay for every service that you need and still have money left over.”<\/p>\n I’d heard this exact suggestion so many times from the providers who were supposed to be working happily within a system that was balanced \u2014 if not equally, then in a teetering stability \u2014 between publicly funded health care and the private system. Health care professionals who were openly scornful of the benefits of a health insurance system so symbiotically entwined with the public sector that one would collapse without the other.<\/p>\n One medical assistant told me years ago she stopped her insurance, banked it all, and had money for a family holiday at the end of the year. Medicare looked after the rest.<\/p>\n When Medicare first kicked off, dental care was seen as nice-to-have rather than a must-have. (AAP: Lukas Coch)<\/p>\n I realised I’d been duped<\/p>\n My endodontist didn’t have the set-up for me to claim at his office (“Why should I do their work for them?”) so it was only from the safe distance at home, where my horror was nowhere near his beleaguered staff, that I realised how I’d been duped.<\/p>\n We have had this insurance cover for more than four decades. In fact, I think I remember receiving some smarmy email about recognising our loyalty and providing us with a special members contact number, on which you wait 45 minutes instead of two hours. The amount of money we have paid this company is appalling. I could calculate it quite quickly in my head \u2014 but I won’t. I can’t say that number out loud.<\/p>\n This was the first time I had ever made a claim on this kind of service. I was surely going to get plenty back \u2026 that’s how it works, right?<\/p>\n My first appointment with my new tooth man cost me $360, including a scan. My insurance cover included endodontics as “extras” so I opened the app, punched in the item numbers and uploaded the receipt. The screen dissolved to reveal my payout: want to guess?<\/p>\n $25.<\/p>\n There is no zero missing in the figure above.<\/p>\n Twenty-five bucks. I snorted. It was actually funny. What kind of dupe pays thousands of dollars a year in health insurance to a system in which I am most likely to be admitted and very well-cared for publicly if I have an emergency, but tosses me crumbs for all the other medical treatments I have been persuaded must be sought privately?<\/p>\n And what kind of publicly funded health care system still doesn’t recognise dental work as foundational to good, general health?<\/p>\n When Medicare first kicked off, dental care was seen as nice-to-have rather than a must-have. It was tagged as preventive and, importantly, not regarded as essential medical treatment. This was a decision rooted deeply in the thinking of the 60s and early 70s \u2014 a time when dental health just wasn’t on the universal healthcare map. That choice, made to rein in costs, still shapes what Medicare covers today.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n