Dental Care

Dont you just hate it when you have to pay (literally!) a visit to your dentist? My last visit to the dentist was back in PA when my root canal got infected and i had to get a surgery done. Im supposed to go back to replace the temporary crown tht i have on but now, on top of being scared of the dentist, im also afraid of the bill. Because you see, hubby has been going to the dentist for the last 2 weeks and he's gonna have to go back for the next 2-3 weeks to get the teeth fix. As much as I dont like going to the dentist, he's even worse. hehe. On his 2nd visit, he has to do quite a number of things (extraction, root canal etc) and the whole thing took almost 4hrs. Im not kidding you. We were there fr 9am till 1pm. At first I waited for him at the reception area then after finding out that its gonna take abt 3hrs, i went in to see him. I can see that he looked scared so i asked him if he wants me to stay around. the conversation goes something like this,

Me, "are you ok, baby?"

Him, "yea. i dont like this"

Me, "do you want me to stick around? the reception says tht i can wait here with you"

Him with a pale-look face, nodded and said, "yes"

So there i was, sitting in the room while the dentist, (whom by the way is very nice and tried her best to calm her patient down while doing her job) and the dental assistant do their stuff. Luckily I had my book with me so it didn feel tht long. :)

Now back to why I havent been going back to the dentist. For those in Malaysia, I will try to give you a scenario on why the doctors, nurses and everybody who works in the health industry is paid very well here in the US and why Malaysian who studied medicine incl those sponsored by Malaysian government bickers and bitch about their pay back home. Everything in the US requires you to have an insurance. There's medical, prescription, dental and vision. If you dont have an insurance, its basically gonna cost you an arm and a leg and your firstborn. (taken fr the ad of a gas station last yr when the price went up). Having insurance doesn mean that you dont have to pay anything either. Like our medical insurance for example, we still have to pay $30 for co-pay for each visit to the doctor and another $10 each for the medications. So each visit to the doctor will cost at least $40 or RM136, not incl the insurance the we'r paying every pay check. Luckily with our plan, all lab test only cost us $10/each so thts not too bad.

As for dental, let me just put the figures here for all the work tht needs to be done on hubby without the insurance. $9,600. That's a whopping Rm32,736! I cant even begin to imagine wht i could have done to my teeth with that sum of money back in Malaysia. No wait, I can! With that amount of money, we BOTH can go back to Malaysia for 2 weeks, get all the work done at KLCC Medical Centre (me and hubby), dining and shopping at KLCC and still have some money left!

Btw, did you realise that I mention everything KLCC? Thts because if you wanna pay more for anything, just go there! tsk tsk tsk. And even with the insurance we still have to pay around 40%.