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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Story from the US: had an awful tooth infection (from a known dead tooth) that I tried to ride out, half my face was swollen up, even my eye looked half shut. Well after a day of this I couldn't take the pain. Called my doctor "we don't pull teeth, you have to call a dentist." So I called a dozen dentist and was told either "we aren't taking new patients" or "we can't get you in for 6 months".

I ended up just driving to a dentist and saying "look at my fucking face! Pull this fucking tooth out!" Finally a dentist was able to spare 30 seconds to yank it. Bill was something like $750.

The US is a dystopian hellhole.

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I got a doctor to pull an internal tooth that had formed a cyst around it, a maxillofacial surgeon.

The dentist quoted $1300 but said insurance wouldn’t cover it, it’d be out of pocket. The surgeon did it (I was awake with local anesthesia) for $300 but insurance paid an additional $4000.

Before all this, A PE owned dentist office (the one that didn’t have the six month wait) had told me two years before that the pain I was experiencing was because I had periodontal disease and that I just needed to get a periodontal cleaning (which cost $750 and didn’t help at all, also conveniently not done by a dentist but a dental hygienist). This turned out to be very dangerous because the cyst was pushing and wearing away at my nose bone, and if I’d waited any longer my nose may have sunk into my face.

It’s definitely maddening the hoops one has to go through to get proper dental care in the US.

Regardless of the financial and administrative issues, dentistry is still far more an art than a science. Go to 10 different dentists for any serious condition and you'll likely receive 10 different treatment plans. In most cases they're making good faith recommendations but there's a huge amount of subjectivity and personal bias involved.

Physicians have recently started embracing evidence-based medicine with documented best practice treatment guidelines so hopefully a similar cultural change will come to dentistry in time.

And you couldn’t just board a plane to Mexico or anywhere down south and get the job done for half the price including said flight? People keep complaining but don’t realize that no place is perfect in this world.

What an asinine response.

Seriously. "Just"

Why though? You demand a service that you can get cheaper abroad. You can’t change the health system but you can travel to a socially developed country that hasn’t yet fallen victim of corruption

A same day flight to Mexico is $1000 where I live. Other countries seem to have figured out healthcare. The US can too.

It might be able to, but only after passing legislation to control guns and protect school children from being victims of daily school shootings

Some places are significantly worse than all others in the same wealth class though.

Somebody further up quoted such insane numbers - $750 for a proper periodontal cleaning? That's usually ~50 to 80€ in Germany. For a _full_ self payer.

Those prices and the health system creating them are utter insanity.

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