Written by Ed Sumcad
by Ed Sumcad
Dental rip-off is a form of cancer nobody wants to cure.
It is the shock of the time for this country’s ailing
healthcare system.
------------
Dental rip-off concludes this expose’ of the country’s greed-ridden healthcare system. It is a form of cancer that nobody either does not have the willingness to know or the courage to cure [Expose’ 1 and 2. Part 2 has a Prologue where the importance and purpose of this satirical essay are written down for the benefit of the readers.]
Bannered news:: Cancer is an epidemic so pervasive it had surpassed heart disease as the number one killer of Americans under age 85. [1] Currently on record, “98.4 percent of the population is under the age of 85.”
But this is arguably old news. The real shocker of the time about cancer let alone our sick healthcare system is this lethal form of cancer called dental rip-off. The bug that causes it is greed.
This cancer is incurable for the simplest of all reasons that nobody in the healthcare industry or in government wants to treat this multi-billion-dollar profit-making malady.
When one has a bleeding periodontal problem, the patient does not only have a bleeding gum but also a bleeding pocket.
Notice carefully … dental insurance plans in this country say you are covered. What that means is that you are covered to pay your own bills [see the ADA Code “NTCV” opposite the rip-off bills the patient is sentenced to pay].
In the “dental benefits” manual, the public is warned that “American Dental Associations [ADA] codes not listed in this document are not covered benefits.” This gives dental clinics an absolute power to charge helpless patients scandalous sky-is-the-limit fees based on their own codes under the category “not listed” for insurance coverage.
Clever? No … just profit-crazed conjurer in actual practice of their nefarious trade! Patients have just been had. The dangled “dental benefits” is a misnomer, in reality an advertised punishment meant to look like an attractive carrot. It is not “dental benefits” but “dental cheats”!
According to medical studies, the bleeding gum is caused by “immune cells” [2] causing bone loss in periodontal tissues. The accompanying pocket bleeding is caused by human cells immune to public scrutiny in their practice of pick pocketing.
They also pull your legs, not just your teeth, in one of the most excruciating rip-offs a human being could possibly endure.
In hard numbers, there are 80 million Americans suffering this dental disease all over the country. Researchers at The Forsyth Institute, issued an alarm [Dr. Toshihisa Kawai, D.D.S., Ph.D. at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060828074634.htm
Health insurance, notably HMO [a glutton that gobbles up monthly Medicare benefits], dental insurance and practicing service providers, are in cahoots robbing the public blind.
Go to the dental clinic to get a treatment, and they swoop down on you like winged predators from the sky and bleed you dry.
In Google, Rip-Off Report floods the Internet with complaints coming from all parts of the country. You will be shocked to find out if you engage them at this point of reference --[http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/129/ripoff0129296.htm]
It is more cruel when you happen to be in the dental clinic with a severe toothache. You cannot drive vultures away by punching them in the nose when the insuperable pain of an abscessed tooth numbs your limbs and paralyzes your will to protest much more mentally and physically resist the dishonesty, shiftiness and crookedness of a dip-pocket wringer.
With a swollen mouth, you can even hardly say no, or cry out loud enough to be heard with an “oh, God help me” screech, after they verbalized the bill that you are going to pay. In timing, this usually occurs right after they sit you down on the dental electric chair. It is an electric chair because that’s where they electrify first and then electrocute patients with a huge dental bill to pay.
If you are this unlucky guy seated on that electric chair, you realize soon enough that you are a victim of a hold up, reminiscent of what exactly those dirty-looking horse-riding varmints of the Old Wild West armed with six shooters do to rail and coach travelers.
The truth is, inside the dental clinic, you are at their profiteering environment, in their own element, in their own moment of money-making. As a victimized patient, you have no control whatsoever, like a fly caught in a spider web ready to be devoured alive, especially when you just have but one thing in mind and you don’t care about anything else anymore … just to get that god dam killing tooth out of your swollen jaw.
Some patients are more enduring of pain and more venturesome with their pride and decide to fight a dental rip-off. They have to decide whether to escape from the clinic with an abscessed tooth and catch an infection and pay the whole nasty experience with their life, or just pay the killing dental bill out of their wallet. Sometimes wise value-counseling could save a patient from this tragedy. To be on guard is worth more than just a pound of cure.
I would like to share with you the wisdom my old man bequeathed to me the day I left the small hometown for the big city. There are only three people close to you who could hold a few seconds of your life in their hand and put you completely under their mercy, in which case you are totally helpless and could do nothing about it. So be nice to them, my old man warned. These people are your food server who could spit on your food they served, your barber who holds a razor close to your throat, and your dentist who could pull a nerve and inflict such pain that you wish you are better off dead.
Down the years I came to know what my old man really meant when he warned me of dental pain that I should guard myself against: yes, I realized, it was that hurting toothache and periodontal problem that troubled most Americans out of personal neglect of their health, and no I didn’t realize until lately, that my old man was also referring to this severe pain in the wallet that most if not all of us are now suffering due to the rising cost of healthcare that kills rather than cure the medically afflicted.
Some of us can survive a killing toothache, the wallet pain many of us might not outlive, because of justifiable rage that causes HBP and eventually stroke or cardiac arrest.
Some of us might even live to a hundred years without seeing a dentist. Centenarians of the Hmong tribes in the remote mountains of the Golden Triangle of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam fight tooth decay by chewing a specially homegrown tobacco, conquer pain by smoking an arm-long weed pipe, and just be their own doctor and dentist.
Rising blood pressure due to heartaches over dental robberies occurring everyday is a registered killer. It is heartache caused by toothaches that kills a lot of Americans, more so when HBP rises in tandem with the skyrocketing prices of oil, prescription drugs, health insurance and medical services.
And here’s more … it is not really bleeding gums but bleeding hearts that caused a great number of Americans to dial 911 for quick appointment with emergency doctors in the ICU. Records show that in this country, millions die of financial hemorrhage. Usually, in bankruptcy, a gun in the temple squares it all.
The dental gang that robs the public blind has no conscience. Probably that’s because the way it is done is very disarming.
For example, when you visit a dental clinic, the desk girl in the counter is normally young, pretty and gracious. She greets you with a disarming smile. That’s because you are being prepared for the slaughter.
The dentist appears cool and coy when asked how much he/she is charging you for his dental service. You normally hear this: I am sorry. I wish I know so that I could tell you. I would even give you a discount if the cost worries you, if I only know how much the clinic is charging per patient for what I do here, but I don’t.
And the conversation normally ends with a rude statement: I just work here.
At this point of your rising wonderment, you get a sympathy dental look and a pat in the back for you to stay calm … no, I did not say a stab in the back [that’s for you to find out].
What you just heard from the dentist, of course, is all baloney! Don’t fall for this innocent crap, much more jump into their trap. Before the kill, they refer you first to several specialists because your case is allegedly not just for the ordinary dentist to handle – just to be sure, you are told, and for your own safety! Each of these attending specialists charges you separately with sky-rocketing fees.
They operate as a group! They do this as an SOP [standard operating procedure], especially to patients whose dental insurance does not cover referral to specialists where billing sky is the limit.
While in the dental clinic, the voices of comfort you hear could be that of a ghoul that your wallet attracts, or that of a serial killer as far as financial murder is about to take place, right before the throat is cut horizontally or brutally fang-punctured, or before the ax is dropped on the jugular vein of your bank account. Financial vampires normally aim for the jugular vein, suck the blood out of your billfold and, if you are paying monthly, the life of your savings slowly ebbs away. That’s how health insurance which includes those so-called “dental plans”, grows fat and fatter everyday, 365 days a year this year, and in the next, and in all the years thereafter. This explains why the industry is larger than that fabled ogre in the story of Jack and the Bean-Stalk. You are Jack that the Giant cut down to pieces, not the bean-stalk.
Healthcare rip-off was $60.0 billion in 2004 according to an astonishing study, actually based on the confession of conscience-stricken Aaron Greenvald [2], a hardworking doctor who took part in healthcare’s legalized “swindle”. The figure had more than doubled to outstanding proportion, since the “swindle” was recorded four years ago.
What is alarming about this dental “swindle” is that, teeth clinics lower their cost by rendering poor quality service to the consumers, to maximize profit. If scams are bad to your health, this one is beastly, and the taking is animalistic.
It is a crime to humanity to encourage and promote this craze modus operandi for quick profit, risking the lives of patients for financial reward. This is the notorious case of Western Dental of California with some 115 dental centers serving some 350,000 Californians. [3]
For repeated abuses of this nature, WDC received a stiff fine of 3 million dollars, the Department of Corporation reported. The culprit was temporarily derailed, paid the fine, and presto [!] is now back on the road. It is that simple.
Corporate predators have accumulated enough profits that they could pay any amount of fines anytime even if willful violations are repeated and paying fines continues till hell freezes over. The money they pay does not come from their account but from the pockets of the public they duped and skinned alive.
Culprits of greed the likes of WDC, can go bust or hang themselves in a nearby tree for all we care. But the onus of our disgusting concern is simply this: For as long as greed can buy out punishment for dental rip-offs, our sick healthcare industry is a permanent host of this type of cancer in the system.
Karl and the country’s radical Left would rather abolish greed for profit by making healthcare the sole responsibility ofgovernment, giving it all free to the people. After all, the struggling class has already paid for it from the fruits of their hard labor, so the Left correctly claims. However, the common denominator to make this possible is more public funding via heavier taxes, which to me in the long haul is rather a higher cost for buying greed out of the system the other way around.
What greed in Capitalism am I talking about? I will talk economics to answer this question. It is an expectation of more than you as an investor, by economic law, is entitled to; it is Adam Smith’s driving free market force that becomes so all-consuming that all rational analysis is left at the back door for happy time to steal it away from you while you exit the front door in a state of abundance and euphoria.
But my objection to Karl Marx’s opposition to Capitalism is that capitalism is mistaken as greed itself. It is not. Capitalism working through free market access is the most efficient tool for wealth creation ever known to man. Radical socialists and Leftist liberals are terribly wrong as usual in their faulty calculus about how man lives in the real world.
I am writing about the theory of compassionate Capitalism in the draft of my book where wealth is channeled not solely to the benefit of the privileged few but to the betterment of society’s dispossessed, as well as to the disadvantaged in life.
The only problem with Capitalism is that it hosts parasites with insatiable craving for wealth.
For example, in the capitalist world, parasites like those in the insurance industry generate a higher cost of Capitalism in terms of loss of life and human suffering. Think of the over-charging dental clinic in your community and its kind all over the country. Think of rich conglomerates that wallow in wealth that because of greed are still running after the pockets of wage earners who work for them as in the case of the Safeway employees that staged a nationwide strike when their chain of rich corporate employers tried to deprive them and their families of health insurance coverage.
Notice carefully that people are dying in this land of abundance, affluence and prosperity because healthcare is unaffordable [?], is a very weird phenomenon if not a high crime abated by public apathy. It is an ugly result of the industry’s profit-propelled abuses of helpless consumers combined with the government’s intentional neglect.
This situational problem is a total disgrace to mankind, more so when this country is ironically known to the world as the most compassionate donor of billions of dollars annually to the oppressed, the poor and the needy everywhere, not just being admired and emulated as the mightiest and the wealthiest nation on the planet!
To human beings the world over who love and worship God, this aberration of mind-boggling proportion is so frightening a wrong to contemplate, so outrageously maddening to even think about it -- absolutely contemptible, unforgivable, despicable and condemnable.
And yet, consider the weakness and vulnerability of our free enterprise society that succumbs to greed. While we kick the bucket in protest of this endemic failure of the system, all the cordial and polite learned can say is that the tragedy is so abhorrently regrettable but at the same time disgustingly understandable!
Attacking all the pretenses of Capitalism, whether facts or fiction does not matter, Karl Marx scores a damning point that even I, the writer of this painful expose’, hate to admit. #
© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access July 11, 2008.
[This ends this 3-part expose’. Readers may comment or react accordingly.]
The writer is an award-winning journalist. You may e-mail your comment at ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.
I agree. I found this post because I am concerned about dentist ripping me off. I have two different dental procedures in the past 2 years and both dentist ripped me off. The first told me that my insurance would not pay for my procedure and charged me $150 pull out a tooth. I was in pain so I paid it. He then submitted the same exact charge to the insurance company for which he received $69. He refunded my money only after I filed a claim with the BBB and filed a small claims suit. A few weeks ago, I had my wisdom tooth surigically removed and the office charged me $216.80. The insurance company stated that I should have paid $68! He charged me for things that were already covered in his reimbursement such as a surgical tray ($80). My insurance company told him that his office cannot charge for that under their contract. I am waiting on a refund. Other dentist have told me that I needed a deep cleaning, while another dentist two weeks later told me my gums looked really good. THis needs to be addressed.
ReplyDeleteThere is no difference that a man going into a bank or store and robbing them with a gun in his hands. The only difference is the Health System gets away with the robbery without some threat of violence. The war is not always on foreign soil but on this countries own turf. Yet the powers to be allow the criminal act of robbery in the health care system to get away with a very criminal act called thief act the expense of its own people.. Your article was on target and maybe someday authorities will come into the offices of thieves and handcuff them and charge them all with a grand thief and have them pay back all who they have taken for their own greed. Capitalism at work was never intended to go this far.
ReplyDelete