Self-Insured Dental Plans

For many companies, it can be difficult to attract and keep ahold of great talents. This is why many companies try to offer the best health insurance programs to their employees that they can afford.

Once they’ve settled on a primary health care insurance program, it is not unusual for companies to consider fully insuring extra services such as vision, temporary disability, and dental insurance. These extra insurance services can help differentiate your company from others in the eyes of a smart, motivated potential hire looking for a new job.

And, most brokers are only too happy to sell you these extra plans, primarily because it’s easy money for them. However, fully insuring these plans can prove to be a massive waste of money.

Thankfully, there’s a way to provide dental insurance coverage at a lower cost than using a fully-insured plan while potentially improving the quality of care: Self-Funded Dental Insurance.

Why Self-Fund Dental Insurance?

There are several reasons why your company would want to use self-funded dental insurance over buying a group dental benefit from a broker, including:

  • Save Money. Companies can save up to 20% on dental insurance costs while still providing the same benefits to employees.

  • Employee Freedom of Choice. Dental insurance plans have their own networks of accepted dental practitioners. Self-funding dental insurance lets your company offer employees the freedom to go to their preferred dentist.

  • Get Data Behind Dental Claims. Fully-insured plans generally leave you clueless as to the nature of the claims made against the plan. Self-funded plans let you access depersonalized data so that you can optimize plan benefits for better preventative care such as annual checkups and cleanings that lower the need for more expensive dental work such as crowns.

Generally speaking, the final reason your company might want to self-fund its dental insurance program is that the annual liability for dental claims per family is pretty well-defined and limited.

The average employee family normally doesn’t incur more than $1,500 in dental liability per year, so there’s no real need to share or pool that risk with expensive insurance premiums. There are colleagues of Thayer Partners who report that they have never had a client lose money on self-insuring their dental insurance in over 20 years of providing insurance coverage because of the limited liability.

Take control of your company’s dental insurance costs and employee care with a self-insured dental program!

Thayer Partners offers companies assistance in health and benefits plan design, recommendations of competitive third-party adminaistrators, and the placement of stop-loss insurance.