this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Probably should give you all a warning about traveling for medical work
1: You will not have access to the same level of after care when you get home. There may also be incompatible medication and procedures to your home country.
2: If something goes wrong you will need to deal with it out there. It may be cheeper for the procedure but you will not have the same resources to emergency or long term care. The cost of repatriation is astronomical compared to the cost of local care.
3: When you get back a local doctor or dentists is not going to touch this as this is someone else's issue and they don't want the liability of something more going wrong. You may need to then find more specialist care and more expensive work to fix what was broken.
4: Good luck getting any compensation. Different country means different legal system. You would need more legal resources to sue a foreign medical provider. Then would lose any savings you made as lawyers get there cut any a court is unlikely to pay out for the cost of what is to them excessive cost in a foreign country.
By all means get the work done but there is risks.
There is risk but you will still receive standard care if you got the initial care somewhere else. It’s just factually wrong that a medical professional, dentist or otherwise, is going to refuse work because somebody else did the initial work unless they’re a quak. It happens all the damn time.
Exactly. You're not looking for a contractor to fix the mess the last contractor left when you fired him for fucking up your driveway, this is the medical field. Doctors fix others doctors mistakes all the time. What are you supposed to do, go back to the quack who caused the problem, or get a new, competent one to fix the problem?
Maybe partly true both ways? Right now, we're going through doctors refusing to try procedures that may have been skipped along her way to pain management care. We're trying to see what we missed and consider all options, but when we bring up her history and "pain management" comes up (which can include medication and procedures), we've been turned away for the clear reason that they won't try to treat if these "pain management" procedures have already been done. But in other cases, they have said "why didn't they try steroid injection first, that would be the standard before a nerve block and ablation" and took the case anyway.
All that same stuff could happen with an American dentist, at 10x the price.
For dental work, you could fly back to the same doctor in Mexico multiple times for the cost of a US doc, even in the unlikely event you do have complications.
Hell, with these numbers, you could get 16 dentists, have them compete head to head in a 4-level tournament, and still afford an espresso machine for the winner.
And the idea that no doc will look at you after going overseas is fear mongering. I went to Argentina or facial feminization surgery (FFS) and Thailand for sex reassignment surgery (SRS.) This was long before insurance companies started getting forced to cover trans care under anti-discrimination laws. So I had to pay for everything out of pocket. The only hope for me to get treatment was to go overseas.
And I've had plenty of follow-up treatment in the states over the years. I had some complications from FFS and had to get some follow up treatment by a US doctor and dentist. And after SRS I've had regular gynecological care, including a pap smear. No doctor who treats trans patients has ever turned me away because I got treatment overseas.
Depends on how good your insurance is. OP is right, there's an added risk and if you have access to affordable dental care at home you should use it.
Dental insurance in the US is almost universally worthless if you need serious dental treatment. It's not real insurance. It's just a prepayment plan for basic services. Most plans have insultingly low annual limits like $1000 or $1500, when even a single implant will cost many multiples of this.
There are a few rare folks that have some gold plated dental coverage. But the default assumption should be that every American is effectively uninsured when it comes to dental insurance. We don't actually have dental insurance in the US, as a general rule.
Good point, I'd forgotten about annual limits.
Honestly, dental insurance as as government single-payer system makes even more sense than regular health insurance as a single-payer system.
The real problem with dental insurance is that most dental procedures can be put off for a long time. People can go years with rotted falling out teeth. Foregoing dental work can cause you a lot of pain, but it's unlikely to actually kill you. This is much less the case with regular health insurance. If you get a cancer diagnosis, you need treatment now. You can't wait five years, save on the premiums, and then sign up for a plan for a single year and get all your cancer treatments done at once. With dentistry you can. This is why dental insurance tends to have annual maximums. Without them, people could forego dental insurance for years, wait until they have a whole bunch of dental work that needs doing, and then only pay for a dental plan long enough to get those treatments covered.
But with a single-payer dental system, that adverse selection problem disappears. With single payer, everyone has to pay for dental insurance every year via taxes. There's no saving up dental work for one expensive year once a decade.
Simply due to the nature of dental care, it's very difficult to make private insurance work as true insurance in the dental market.