Today in adulting: At nearly 38, I learned that dental insurance almost isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

I have fairly good teeth, so I haven’t had dental insurance in 20 years.

But my spouse has awful teeth and has a dental insurance plan through Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

They pitch it as paying for 80% of minor work (extractions, fillings) and 50% of major (crowns, root canals, and dentures), but what I found out is that their plan and their paper Explanation of Benefits that you get in the mail is really deceptive.

What actually will happen is a bunch of things like, the dentist charges $275 for a filling, but Blue Cross/Blue Shield has an “allowable amount”.

Now, on HEALTH insurance, an allowable amount would mean that they gave you a network discount and then paid 80% of that.

But on DENTAL, it means something else completely. If you get a $275 filling, 80% is actually about $80 that the plan pays, and then you pay $195.

Confused? Well, it turns out that the Allowable Amount for a filling is abut $100, and so 80% of that is $80, and then you owe the dentist $195.

So, we started doing a bunch of dental work on my spouse and I paid $1,265.01 as we went last year, and then insurance paid $1,500. Then imagine my shock today to open a bill for $1,661.79.

We’re not even done yet and I got sandbagged with this extra bill that I was not expecting. And of course I never used dental insurance, so I never realized that the insurance companies use borderline-fraudulent business practices in their advertising in order to sell it to you.

On top of this hogwash, BSBS also makes you wait a year before you can have any major operation done.

So while it is insurance and it does pay something, you can generally only expect it to pay about 30% of a filling even though they proudly proclaim they pay 80% of what I can only imagine a dentist charged 25 years ago.