this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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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.