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The UK’s dental care is also not really covered by the NHS beyond a few emergency procedures, and even when it is (assuming you can get onto an NHS dentist’s register) it costs a significant amount of money (70+ for checkup and dental work) once you turn 18, so I can imagine that most people just don’t bother.
I’ve already resigned myself to getting most of my teeth removed or replaced, as painful as that is, because I spent years without dentist cover thanks to COVID and generally refusing to spend the costs on checkups (as bad an idea that was)
I do have insurance, as we’re legally required.
Haven’t been to a dentist for years even tho i need it, the money isn’t there. Insurance only covers it for a small amount if you pay a premium, which i’m not doing obviously.
I went to my childhood dentist after being unemployed and homeless, dad was convinced the government would get me a house and when i lived with him they told me “no, that’s the old system”. He didn’t believe me so he kicked me out because he was so sure of himself.
When i got to the dentist after a couple of years he started pointing out what premium things i needed and how i could afford them after saving the money from the years i didn’t go. I tried to explain to him like an adult that i had lost my savings and was pushed into homelessness and unemployment.
He then decided to get his ego bruised and started calling me names.
I got pretty sick of his childish behaviour and decided to never come back.
I tried a differenr dentist when i was actually ready and could see myself build up the funds again, but i ended up having to move for a job and life has only gotten more expensive while my wage stayed stagnant.
Right now i’m making more, finally but it’s at a job i’m not sure i can physically handle. It’s been 4 weeks now and it’s 4 weeks of backpain and painkillers to keep going.
Docs tend to lose sight of the fact that everyone is not able to pay their fees, some even with insurance.
I’ve discovered over the years that middle class people have absolutely no idea how most of the country lives.
Well, most people think they are middle class.
In Canada the public health cover doesn’t cover dental so you’ll have little luck in that category. You might get a free cleaning and scan but little else. It’s like one of the few things they’ve been dragging their feet on still.
A lot of people live on Advil until the tooth falls out on its own. Or if they can afford the cheap option: have it pulled.
You still need to get private coverage for anything more.
It’s a good thing teeth aren’t part of the human body!
There’s a recent federal Canadian dental health care plan that expands the options for people who make under 90k a year or something along those lines.
Might be worth a look
For the bulk of the population (between ages 18 - 64) the program doesn’t start until 2025 … so soon.
Having public healthcare is a miracle!!. You should be grateful for that.
People with mild discomfort (e.g. a persistent cough) fill up most of the emergency rooms where I’m from, since the hospital is free. Unfortunately what this means is if you have a non life threatening problem, you have to wait in the same room as people with colds and flues that should be in bed waiting it out and eating soup.
Here in the states, people fill up the ER not because its free… its because they legally cant turn you away without looking at you first…
to be fair, if you have a bad case of the flues you should be in the ER.
A bad case, yes.
I’ve been working nonprofit for a couple of decades but it hasn’t supported me well. I haven’t been to the dentist in 22 years. I’m thankful I don’t have any tooth pain. My wife is in the same boat. We had worked side jobs and hustled during COVID to put away some cash for it, saved up $19k. Only to need massive foundation/waterproofing work on our home. Now we’re broke, my job contract ends in less than a month. I was worried about my teeth, now I’m worried about my family being homeless.
progress
Never forget that real technological progress is being made, but an ever-growing percentage of your labor is stolen from you.
Ah! Capitalism
Get a credit card
Use card to pay for getting your teeth done
Burn the card
Wait 7 years
Repeat till dead
What ?
You can declare bankruptcy every 7 years. I believe that’s what OP was referencing.
I’m not murican so money isn’t the problem for me.
Its a crippling fear of doctors founded by a single dingle berries mistake over 10 years ago causing a year of problems and a skin transplant.Many countries outside America does not cover dentist in social public health services.
They like premium bones or something.
In my country we have public healthcare but not dentists. If you want teeth you have to pay.
, Care to share? So we can learn from your mistakes?
I don’t think its possible to do actually.
It was a mistake cause he removed a little thing from my skin that ended up causing me to be sick for a week cause he didn’t close it up properly, it than went on to come back twice as bad.
If I’d have to turn it into a lesson, maybe triple quadruple check online if your the doctor you plan on going to has zero negative complaints?I absolutely do not mean to diminish your pain or discount your experience, but every medical procedure comes with risks. Skin closures (sutures or otherwise) can be done correctly in the first place, but it is possible for the suture knot to come untied or for the suture material to break, and infection is the main risk for any procedure that breaks the skin.
To others reading this: the vast majority of physicians are competent professionals that always do the best that they can, but things can go wrong even if they do everything right. If a physician has one complaint against them for a poor outcome, that’s pretty normal. If there are no complaints at all whatsoever, they probably haven’t been in practice long enough for the statistics to catch up to them. If there’s a pile of complaints (especially ones that cite carelessness or callousness) that would be one to be wary of.
Woof. So sorry.
Going to the doctor half the time feels like a waste anyways. No matter how sick I am, I’m never given medicine or antibiotics and I’m always told to wait a week to see if it gets worse. It already had to be a big deal for me to go the first time around, I’m basically done after that and resigned to suffering without help. The worst was when I had been perpetually sick with something for 5+ weeks right before Covid first hit, never got anything and doctor was just like, “Yeah, some colds or flus can go for that long.”
For physical injuries though, that shit is important and that seems like something they can treat, but anything else it’s just, “You’re on your own, good luck!”
The last time I went to the doctor was over a year ago, and it was because my mouth/throat was in so much pain I called my friend, who lived 30 minutes away, and begged her to come take me to urgent care while bawling my eyes out.
The initial nurse that comes in is this dude, and I hate male medical professionals when I’m male-presenting: it’s like this fucking machismo bullshit. He’s trying to do the thing where they swab your throat or are just looking back there, and he’s asking me to open wide, and I’m trying but I’m in excruciating pain and apparently couldn’t open wide enough.
So he drops his hands in this exasperated/annoyed gesture and goes, “C’mon man, it’s not that bad, open up.”
I lost it. “Get the FUCK out of this room and send the actual fucking doctor in here! How dare you tell me I’m not in fucking pain when I can’t fucking swallow or breathe without tears welling up! Get the FUCK away from me, NOW!!!” Funnily enough, my mouth was open plenty wide after I lost it on him, and he scurried out the room as soon as she got his swab.
Woman doctor comes in a few minutes later, sees me bawling my eyes out while my friend is comforting me. Doctor doesn’t give me any shit while she’s examining me, and turns out, I had a serious infection behind my tonsils, not strep like douchebag kept telling us it probably was while telling me to “man up.”
Doctor gave me some steroids and told my friend that my, “throat was in really bad shape,” and that she was putting in a rush order for antibiotics at the pharmacy. I was to take the pills immediately when we got home, and again roughly 4-6 hours later (this was around 4 o’clock).
She ended our visit with, “Listen, if you take the second pill around 10, and if you’re not feeling any better by 10:30, you need to go to the ER for emergency surgery, those tonsils are gonna go septic.” But “c’mon man, it’s not that bad.” 🙄
The pills worked, I survived, but my blood boils just thinking about the whole situation and how comfortable that dude was in his attitude towards patients in pain.
Good on you for blowing up at that jackass.
Antibiotics for colds or flu will not help because those are viral, not bacterial. A general doctor should have given you a referral to a specialist. But Antibiotics would be stupid
Maybe. But after 5+ weeks, you run the severe risk of secondary infection. A “cold” that runs that long, isn’t the virus anymore, but the secondary infection taking hold. Antibiotics may not be the right call, but they might be. A “stick it out” attitude on a respiratory infection is the right path, if your goal is pneumonia.
Edit: source- my doctor, when I didn’t want to take the antibiotics for a respiratory infection that I had had for 8 weeks. It cleared within 5 days of starting the antibiotics…
I hate going to hospitals, especially in cities. They really don’t seem to care unless they can physically see how injured you are. I saw an independent nurse and a walk in clinic before they both said to go to the ER when I tore something inside my abdomen. Waited 15 hours to be seen, struggled to breath without pain, and passed out from pain during the Xray. The Dr said I passed out from anxiety and sent me home with nothing and no advice.
One of the absolute worst experiences I’ve had at a hospital, and all I wanted was to make sure it wasn’t my gall bladder. Of course they also charged the obscene US prices too
What ended up happening with your abdomen?
While working out I apparently tore a bit of some lining that surrounds the organs, it just happened to be near where the gallbladder is. 0/10 would not recommend, breathing and moving hurt a lot.
I HAVE dental insurance, NO ONE FUCKING ACCEPTS IT.
The “in-network” thing is anyoing. As long as the place has a license and hasn’t been a issue, they should be “in-network”.
Having insurance tied to a job doesn’t help either. if you/family member needs specialist care, so you find a fantastic doctor, but oops your job changed insurance provider and now your doc is out of network.
Complaints aside, if you’re actually having trouble finding a dentist; go to your insurance’s website, they probably have a “find a dentist” tool or something.
Yeah, just a 3 hour drive away.
That bad? Do you work remote or something? That’s the only reason I can that your work would go with a provider with no dentists nearby.
This is why dentists in the US decided to not make themselves part of the same system as other medical doctors-- The ADA vs AMA. They get to make their own rules and more importantly, deals to get paid.
And full cash money rules over whatever any insurance company decides to pay you.
Insurance companies designed their policies to maximize profit over patient care. Dentists said fuck that racket
And created their own racket.
a dentist racket
Mine still submits to my insurance, I just have to pay on the day and I get a check in the mail later
I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone. Even though it may take a while for specialists. I even get benefits for going to free appointments at the dentist. Safes money and pain later, leading to more productiveness as well.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂). Being in a hospital, receiving anything I needed just by showing my insurance card (for which I didn’t have to pay anything either as I was without a job at that point). And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks I’m more than glad to pay that back.
The US just weirds me the fuck out. I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone.
Stimmt so aber nicht ganz. Die meisten Leute glauben bei uns wäre die Krankenversicherung verpflichtend, aber nicht jeder Staatsbürger ist krankenversichert.
Shit, das Problem habe ich tatsächlich übersehen. 🫣
Zumindestens ist das Problem auch als solches deklariert, da müsste definitiv nachgebessert werden. Ich würde jedoch behaupten das, im Vergleich zur USA, hier die Ausnahme die Regel bestätigt. Rein rechtlich hat hier jeder Krankenversicherungsschutz, es müssen “nur” diese Löcher gestopft werden durch die manche Menschen fallen.
I’m Italian and here public healthcare gets worse every day, thanks to continuous budget cuts and political incompetence. Nowadays if you want get blood tests in my region you have to wait months, or go through insurance, usually provided by… Your employer. Fuck them all.
Ouch. There is a big medical school here and there is a decent amount of medical offices in the area. I can walk down the road in the morning for standard blood work and view my test results on my phone by the afternoon. Specialists can still be months of waiting though.
I’m sorry to hear that… I expected something like this the moment the fascists won though. As far as I know you also lost social security (as in money for the jobless), right?
We probably have this in our future as well. Despite our government generally doing a good job (despite & except the neoliberal dick who once was our finance minister and just got fired) in this last legislature, far-right media propaganda is simply overwhelming. A christo-fascist outcome isn’t too unlikely next time. 😔 It will wreak havoc on everything.
Yeah no the fascists don’t have anything to do with this, or better, they’re just the last of a list of legislatures going back to the 90s who kept cutting the public services’ budgets, with a big upturn after the 2008 subprime crisis.
No we haven’t lost unemployment pay, they removed, for better or for worse, what the previous government instituted and labelled as “universal basic income”, which in the end took the form of a more generous unemployment pay, but we still have the standard one.
The truth is there’s actually very little difference between “left” and “right” governments nowadays: 10 years ago Renzi, with an allegedly left-wing government, actuated the biggest removal of workers right in recent history… They’re all rich kids anyway, all they care about is taking more and more money from the general populace.
What’s worse is that millions of people actually find the idea of paying a dime for anyone else’s healthcare disgusting. And we don’t even get to have a super low tax rate. We just spend our tax money on murdering children across the globe instead of caring for our own. Millions of us see it and oppose it but our society is just sick enough with enough asshole republicans gaming the system in a way that keeps us from doing a fucking thing about it. I wish we were as civilized as nations like Germany.
More than once, I hear an ad on the radio about good Christians coming together to help pay each other’s medical bills and think to myself that is the very thing they hate so much.
Some people consider the consent part of that arrangement to be key.
But they get to choose whose medical bills get paid. They can make sure that only “good Christians deserving of Jesus’ mercy” are the ones getting assistance. Not some stranger in the urban ghettos with children born out of wedlock, etc.
These are the people that will make the distinction between “drug addict” and “person with substance use disorder” based on demographics like race, socioeconomic status, and religion.
Uhhh no it’s not?
It’s literally a system where only Christians get benefits.
I’m also assuming one can be denied benefit if they were not a good enough Christian.
Neoliberals are also in on it too, not just republicans. And that’s our system. It’s all fucked top to bottom.
I knew someone would say something like this. But it’s not the same. I’ve discussed this a million times. If you’re willing to admit Republicans are many, many times worse then maybe we can talk. If you’re going to erase the difference then it’s a no-go from me
If you are going to erase the damage and disgusting acts of neoliberals, then it is also a no go from me.
Enjoy your bOtH SiDeS
Not the person you’re responding to, but enjoy being taken for a ride. There’s always a Joe Lieberman, a Kyrsten Sinema, a Joe Manchin, or a senate parliamentarian (what?) to act as a foil, preventing any leftward movement at all and instead ratcheting right.
Neoliberals will sooner appease fascists than act as traitors to their class by doing anything left wing at all.
We are fucked either way it’s just a matter of damage control. A third party win simply won’t be tenable anytime soon. I really tire of this conversation. No one has ever convinced me there’s any chance a third party could even get over 10% of votes. It’s not remotely believable. Seriously are you guys on heavy drugs? I honestly cannot fathom believing that route could ever, ever work.
It’s all manipulation, Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly. In general, unless you’re talking about bigotry and deep-seated prejudice, most of the dumb stuff Americans believe, we have been essentially force fed.
In this case, for historical reasons I don’t remember ATM, it became normalized for employers to offer health insurance and for that to be the primary way people obtained health insurance. Combine that with the strategy to teach poor white people to hate on minorities, as a way to feel superior to someone and thus less angry about their own lot, and you can start to see how the link between employment and healthcare can be seen by some as a moral situation - the person without the good job to get the healthcare must be lazy, and since we don’t want to encourage laziness, it’s therefore acceptable (even preferred!) not to take care of them.
I can’t stress enough how much effort is put into teaching a huge portion of America to fear and hate, constantly. We wouldn’t be this bad otherwise, we’re pretty normal folks by and large. Even pretty kind and generous, often. We’ve just been really fucked up, and very deliberately.
It was during the Great Depression and WWII that employer-provided health insurance took off. The fed instituted a wage freeze to combat inflation in the 40s, and as a result, employers had to start offering other incentives like health insurance to attract/retain their workforce.
FDR wanted to pass universal healthcare (along with a lot of other progressive policies) under his Second Bill of Rights, but it never came to be. Had his ideas been enshrined in law, we’d have universal healthcare, a minimum livable wage, adequate housing, the right to work, and several others.
Thanks, I vaguely remembered it being related to WWII and being intended as a temporary stopgap measure due to having few other options, it being a rough time…but I didn’t remember the details well enough to cite like that. We ought to make this a bit of common knowledge, truly!
Entire organizations (insurance companies) who do not facilitate health and well-being in any significant way at all - and often impede it, with real commitment! - profit massively from this dysfunction, while both patients AND caregivers suffer mightily, to feed the parasite.
That combined with the fact that the “health insurance via employment” system was set up as essentially a crisis response which should never have been maintained…just really needs to be hammered home.
Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it’s tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for “self reliance” that has IMO been corrupted into “You’re on your own, sucker. Got mine.” instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as “picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps” these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well…ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one’s life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it’s your fault if you’re not self-reliant, and people have decided that it’s better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
I have very little to disagree with here, and I somewhat accept your premise that we’re being driven to be the thing we’re behaving as. I mean, that’d just be “fake it til you make it” in a particularly gross context.
However - I’ve drank beers (and bad shots, why not) around exactly the kinda folks you’d expect to find in some of the diviest bars in parts of rural America that barely (or don’t) have a grocery store. Some of those folks are irredeemable, don’t get me wrong. A whole lot of them, though, are truly decent folks who’ve been completely misled.
That was a work thing that I hated and left behind some years ago, but I know very personally two current Trump voters. If you reduce those 2 people to a ballot, pretty easy to condemn them. If you know them the way I do, it’s just blatantly obvious they have no idea who and what they voted for. They were fooled, conned, by a known successful conman. It’s really that simple.
Edit: redundancy
Because they are constantly conned and have no idea how they are voting somehow makes them good and ok? Idk still seems insanely ignorant and dangerous to me.
I’m not making excuses for them, and I intend to keep track of the most egregious things that happen under the upcoming Trump administration so I can say to them “is this what you wanted? We knew this would happen and voted against it, you voted for it, is this what you wanted?”
And I never said their ignorance makes them good and okay, what a silly idea. They are good people first - one of them, for example, fought for custody of his kids and raised them as a single dad. It was super necessary and he did it very well. That’s a few steps beyond just “okay”, anyway.
There’s that line from MiB: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
While not entirely accurate (there are plenty of dumb individuals, willfully so or otherwise), to paraphrase it a little that encountering individuals one-on-one is almost always great. People can be really interesting, and are generally pretty cool. As soon as hot button topics pop up, the ideology kicks in, and they’re not so cool or interesting anymore. They get angry, mulish, and make it personal.
While I do know just what you mean (and find that line useful too), I’m not describing the same thing you are. I’m describing people I know very well who don’t substantially disagree with me on hot button topics, but have been fooled into voting against the things they actually care about.
I’m not describing casual acquaintances that don’t work out once people get to know one another, I’ve absolutely had that experience though.
That’s not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain’t as bad as they’re being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we’re properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It’s hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of “human bad, human needs to be controlled” was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like “Lord of the Flies”.
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain’t inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It’s the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
Oh yes, the US system is based more and more on “crabs in a bucket”. I mean, it’s always kinda been like that, but now it’s industrialized. Get yours, get famous, fuck everyone else.
I’m not familiar with Tongan Castaways but will have to give it a look. I felt similarly abused by the revelations of the Stanford Prison Experiment - my understanding of the experiment (pre reveal) did shape, to some degree, my understanding of humanity.
As I’ve gotten older and times have gotten more fraught, it’s become clearer and clearer that most people are fundamentally pretty decent, pretty “meh” at knowing what’s important to focus on (or even likely or possible to be accurate), and - critically - most of us are very vulnerable to fear-based manipulation. Those three traits are not as discordant as they seem.
Unrelatedly, I find it odd but endearing that you seem to use “ain’t” kinda routinely, as a German, lol. Even lotsa Americans don’t. That’s not a veiled accusation, btw, you seem genuine to me and I simply wonder how you came by it. Sharing things is great, for my part as much as I love odd beers and experimentation, y’all’s Reinheitsgebot has improved my life in a non-trivial way, hahaha
Wait, isn’t “ain’t” commonly used? If there is some “undertone” to it of being not genuine please tell me, I would never know otherwise. 😅
“Ain’t” is fairly regional in the US, and also kind of a class indicator. Class is not quite right but it’s close. In general you find it used a lot more frequently in the south, and also generally in lower income populations. It’s also less common among folks for whom English is their 2nd (+) language.
If you like it, keep using it! Language should feel good.
Edit: missed your “please tell me” part - it does stick out a bit the way you use it. It’s a very casual and informal word, almost to the point of being crass, and it doesn’t normally get used in the kinds of eloquent writing you do.
Yes but also the brainwashing wouldn’t be effective if Americans didn’t eat it up, which they do. It takes two to tango and the population here is really ignorant on many fronts, and that’s not just the media or government’s fault.
And arguing that Americans aren’t really psycho doesn’t work that well especially with the elections and their beliefs in general. Americans seem the most psycho to me, but hey I just live here.
I really don’t think Americans have some unique makeup that makes us different, we’re all just humans. What’s different in America is the effort spent and the success achieved in manipulating our population to be hateful and scared.
I do take your point though, we are still culpable. It does take two to tango.
Here in privatized US it takes ages to see specialists AND regular doctors!
And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks
By “complete dicks” you mean people like Friedrich Merz?
Merz, Lindner, Söder… pick your poison. Anyone who wants to dismantle our solidarity systems instead of fixing (or even expanding) them.
We can only hope for our politicians to learn enough from the utter disaster in places like Britain to at least leave them be.
Fotzenfritz
Even here, “cosmetic” dental work can be pricey. IIRC, my braces were covered by insurance, but the retainer wire after that had to be paid up front by my parents with some kind of “insurance will pay back 80% of it after ten years” clause. One has fully broken off and should have long been replaced, the other broke partially and should be replaced too, but I don’t really have the money to drop 600 on that right now if I don’t know how much I’ll get back.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂).
Congratulations, friend! 🎊
It’s not even selfish. It bites the people who fight for it in a thousand different ways.
It’s just silly. If they were any good at being selfish, they’d want people to have healthcare, because everybody else’s shit makes your world better or worse regardless of your money or whether you acknowledge it.
The USA is The Land of Personal Responsibility™
Not everyone. Not if you have private insurance.
I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
It’s because the US is far too big. People in one part of it have a very different culture to people in a different part of it, as a result they find it hard to empathize with them because their lives are so completely different. The problem is that they are all one country and operate under one government.
The individual state governments help a little bit (except when they’re trying to write laws to one-up each other), but basically the US government is trying to implement laws that will apply across wildly different cultural ideologies.
From the highly religious almost zealot south (Texas, Florida), to the mostly secular north east (Washington), to the liberal west (California), to the farming belt in the Central regions.
Judgmental bitch. Dental insurance coverage is so much worse than medical it’s can be basically non existent
Privilege is blinding. The dentist can’t fathom how a “normal” person they are speaking to couldn’t afford to go to a dentist. It doesn’t even register. The dentist then must assume it was pure laziness or apathy.
And yet they’re still a working class wage slave.
A lot of Dentist retire by 50. They are not exactly wage slaves but I get what you are saying.
Well yes. Certainly they’re near the top of the bottom.
Probably more like petite bourgeois. But still more in common with the person in the chair than the actual bourgeois .
It is laziness or apathy. If for 30 years you were unable to spare $100 for a single checkup, then you are either sick or suck at managing money. And if you still can’t afford that for 30 years, there are organisations that will do it for free - you just need to reach out to them.
Being unable to put aside $100 for a year, year and a half - sure. Being unable to put aside $100 for thirty years? Yeah, nah.
In addition to the other reasons, there is also the worry of surprise charges. You’ll go in for a $100 checkup, only to find a bunch of other “standard” fees and services tacked on at the end. They’ll act like this is normal, and you’re weird for asking how much it costs up front.
This is twice as bad at the doctor than at the dentist.
Weak argument. You just ask them upfront for the cost or at least brackets. They can act however they want after adding to that cost. You asked upfront, were given the amount and that’s what you can pay. Otherwise all you are doing is letting peer pressure drive your actions. Also, a fear of surprise charges is about as much of an excuse as anything else. You are risking a lot by not doing a checkup in so many years, and “surprise charges” isn’t a reason to not do it.
Have you ever actually tried this? They often don’t even know the brackets up front.
Never had that issue.
It’s not the cost of the checkup I worried about. It was the cost of fixing any problems they find. At that point why bother getting the checkup if I can’t afford that?
Regular checkups help prevent issues popping up. Also, you not knowing about those issues doesn’t make them go away. And some can cause you to become sick. Dentistry isn’t just for looks.
Cool. Not being able to pay for the repair doesn’t make them go away either.
Completely ignored the “checkups help prevent issues”. Also, you might catch something that is about to kill you or incapacutate you.
Not that it helps people who literally can’t afford it… But dental “checkups” are primarily about doing the cleaning, which is for preventing issues before they get that big. Identifying existing issues is secondary, but the regular dental appointment is doing more actual work than your typical physical examination.
Which is why most dental plans cover regular cleanings entirely, but you need to pay out of pocket for any other work you want. They would rather pay the entire cleaning bill every 6 months than pay part of your root canal once.
It really is expensive to be poor
Nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/), and lots of those struggle to cover their standard expenses. Getting your teeth checked doesn’t help you stay in paying work. If you manage to save a few hundred you’re probably going to spend it on that house or car repair that you’ve been needing for months, or some new clothes for your kids.
I paid $2900 for my mom to get dentures.
I haven’t been to the dentist in probably ten years. Still follow the routine, but, yeah.
I protest the high prices of dental treatment by traveling abroad. It’s not only cheaper, but also a great opportunity to travel.
Even if I did go to a doctor, it might be because most insurance covers seeing a doctor but not dental shit.
Those are luxury bones!
It’s sad. They’re not just luxury bones in the US either. National healthcare here in Estonia only covers dental until you turn 19 and then all you get is a tiny annual benefit, rest is out of pocket. I believe that most countries don’t give adults dental coverage :/
Essentially the health board is completely fine paying for cancer treatments, broken bones, or to have a suspicious mole removed. They’ll subsidize prescription medication. But TEETH!!! WHO NEEDS THOSE???
The amount of money we get makes it feel like we don’t need them. Just drink smoothies all day.
It’s such a stumble of history that teeth were historically associated with barbers and not doctors, causing the dental practice industry to evolve separately from all other medical practices. Bullshit how a vestige of that lives on today in dental insurance coverage being its own special snowflake thing.
