How to Get an Insurance Dental Plan for My Company in San Francisco?

Do you own company or are responsible for handling HR/Benefits in one? In this post, we go through the options for your company to offer dental plans to employees.

Before writing this post, I wanted to find out how hard it is to get a dental plan for our own company [even though we don’t really need one as everyone in our office(s) are 100% covered by our corporate plan]. I had heard about the pain of talking to insurance companies but I wanted to see first hand how the experience is. For the purpose of writing this article I contacted a few major dental insurance companies: Delta, Cigna, Aetna, Metlife and Guardian. I asked them to send me a quote for a group of 10 people + families. Then I sent them our employee census so that they can accurately send me a quote. I was under the impression that this should be straight forward but boy, I was wrong!

Here is what I learned from this experience:

• Unless your company is larger than 50 people, your options are very limited and expensive and/or cover the bare minimum.
• Some insurance companies only offer you dental plans if you also get your medical plan from them. This limits you immensely.
• The HMO options are just terrible. Period! They are only accepted in low-end  dental offices and even then they cover the bare minimum.
• The PPO options are expensive and/or very limited ($1000-$2500 annual limits + frequency limits, etc)
• Insurance companies are slow and have lengthy processes for the simplest tasks like getting me a quote on their own services! It took me a month on average to get a quote. The bureaucratic process is just terrible for what seems like a simple service.
• There is no consistent pricing. You can get quoted differently for the same plan/company differently if you go through two different brokers!

If you are are looking for a dental plan for your company, you can go with traditional dental plans through insurance companies (and/or brokers). The experience for me was painful and gave me a few expensive options (more than $55 per month) for plans that only cover up to $1500 per year. Considering that you pay $660 per year per person, the insurance company is just insuring you for $890 which is, to be honest, a rip-off considering many people don’t use their company plan for years. We have already discussed different types of dental insurance plans so you can read through them to have an idea as to what kind of plan you can get for your company.

If you are in Bay Area you also have another option. You can get your dental insurance plan from Soothing Dental. Our business model, unlike insurance companies, is dentistry and not finance. We view this service as subscription-based dentistry for companies even though it offers the same features as an insurance plan. Since we do the dental work ourself, we can offer better rates than traditional dental insurances.