Is Group Dental Right for Your Small Business?

Group dental plans are an excellent alternative for the small or medium-sized business owner who wants to attract and keep the very best employees. Employees list dental benefits as a close third in importance when ranking all the benefits of working at a particular place, behind medical benefits and retirement benefits. Offering a group dental policy to your employees is a cost-effective way to satisfy their needs.

Several of the major medical insurance providers offer group dental benefits as part of the insurance package for small businesses. Adding an all care dental plan is much easier on your employees and yourself if you add a group dental rider to the major medical benefits package. Paperwork and accounting are streamlined for everyone because you are dealing with one insurance company.

In addition, using a major provider gives your employees access to superior customer service representatives and online status and claims information 24 hours a day. Your employees can check on how many of their benefits have been used so far, waiting periods, and even adding a new family member without involving the human resources department of your business. Smaller group dental plans may not offer these worthwhile intangible benefits that make using insurance so much easier.

A group dental plan will usually be structured as a preferred provider organization or as a health maintenance organization, meaning a large number of participants across the nation have benefits through the group dental plan. There is a lot of power in numbers.

Premiums are generally lower, and many thousands of dentists and clinics are contracted with the insurance company to be preferred providers. Substantial discounts may be available on a wide number of procedures beyond the usual preventive care. Your employees will enjoy the flexibility of having many dentists to choose from, and the ability to change to another in-network dentist without a referral if they so desire.

One drawback to group dental plans is that some companies have waiting periods before benefits become effective. Your employees can sign up whenever they like, and add new family members to the policy, but may be delayed in seeing the dentist until the specified waiting period has passed.

In addition, some dental insurance policies have a “Missing Tooth” clause, which means they will not allow certain procedures to be started or finished until a certain period of time has passed. The Missing Tooth clause limits fixing broken or ill-fitting dental procedures such as bridges, crowns, and dentures.

If you have not offered dental benefits to your employees before, check with your major medical insurance provider to see if group dental benefits can be easily added onto your current policy. You must call your insurance provider to find out the details of adding the policy, such as cost, waiting periods, limitations, and so on. You may decide it is more cost effective for your small business and your employees to offer supplemental dental insurance instead, or perhaps a discount dental plan.