California supports a robust dental insurance market for its millions of residents. The upside of this situation is the wide variety of benefit designs, dentist networks, and price points. The downside of this variety is the complexity of finding the right plan for your circumstances. Thankfully, this guide will simplify your insurance shopping by:
Dental for Everyone Gold
Increasing benefits after the first and second years. Keep your dental plan regardless of age.
Plan Maximum: $1000
Hollywood Smile Premier 2500
Use one of our 115,000 network providers to get the most from this plan. No waiting periods. Increasing benefits.
Plan Maximum: $2000
Immediate Coverage Plan
Immediate coverage with no waiting periods for most services. Generous plan maximum.
Plan Maximum: $3000
Price quotes for dental insurance are affected by several factors. First and foremost, how many people will be covered by the plan? Is the policy for an individual, a married couple, or a family with several children or dependents? A second issues is that the same dental insurance plan may be priced differently across the state because of the regional cost of care (in other words the cost of dentists in Orange County may not be the same as in the Bay Area).
This 2023 DentalInsurance.com review of the California dental market examined 44 dental plans sold in the state. The lowest available premium (note - prices varied on state region) among the 44 options was $6.95 a month (Dental Health Services' SmartSmile DHMO) for a 33-year-old sample enrollee. The most expensive monthly premium was $93.65 for Nationwide's Classic 2000 + VSP Premium, a plan that combined dental benefits with vision coverage. For $85.44 a month, Delta Dental's Immediate Coverage Plan PPO offered broad coverage with no waiting periods. This option also included orthodontic coverage, which is less common among traditional dental plans.
Across the 44 dental plans examined, the average monthly premium for a thirty-three year-old Californian was $45.48. The companies offering the 44 plans examined were Ameritas, Anthem BlueCross, California Dental Network, Careington, Delta Dental, Dental Health Services, Guardian Dental, Humana Dental, MetLife Dental, Nationwide, NCD (who offered plans in partnership with MetLife and Nationwide), and Renaissance. This group represents a subset of all the insurers within the state. On California's Department of Insurance website, we found 52 corporate entities submitting Medical Loss Ratio information on 2021 California dental plans.
While we strongly recommend shopping on a combination of benefits, dentists, and premium, some consumers just want to know what the cheapest dental plans are. In our California study, we found several plans offered in various parts of the state that were under $20 a month in premiums (though premiums can vary by region):
Depending on the insurance company, premiums may vary by region, number of enrollees, and other factors. However, a higher premium does not necessarily mean superior insurance coverage. Benefits vary significantly from one plan to another, and this variation does not neatly align with each plan's price. For example, 90.9 percent of the plans analyzed had a limit on how much the plan would pay annually toward an enrollee’s dental costs (this limit is called the "maximum benefit"). The lowest maximum benefit was $500 and the highest was $10,000 (NCD Complete by MetLife). It is important to note that three different plans were more expensive than the NCD Nationwide 5000 Plan but had maximum benefit limits thousands of dollars less. The average maximum benefit in the study was $1,818, which was 14 percent higher than 2022’s average of $1,597. Some plans had maximum benefits that increased in the second and third year of continuous enrollment and the average referenced above was based on the maximum limits applying to the first year of enrollment. 14 plans in the study had a maximum benefit higher than the state average and an additional four plans had no maximum benefit limits. The plans without the maximum benefit limits were HMO dental plans and one dental discount program (Careington 500 Series Dental Savings, which cost less than $10 a month).
38.6 percent of the 44 plans had no waiting periods on any of the covered services. A waiting period is a delay between the time an insurance plan becomes active and the date when a specific service will be paid for by the plan. Waiting periods are often placed on high-cost services such as crowns and root canals. Waiting periods are often as short as 90 days or as long as a year. A single plan had a waiting period of 18 months before major dental work was covered.
Out-of-pocket costs vary greatly for the same service. The average portion of a cavity filling fee covered by California PPO and indemnity dental plans was 61 percent. There were plans whose cost contribution was as low as 20 percent and others with contributions as high as 80 percent. Extractions had lower cost coverage among this group with an average of 44.4 percent of costs being covered (with several plans having no coverage for extractions in the first year of enrollment).
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