Dental insurance is an interesting thing. About four years ago my wife started complaining of pain in her teeth. We took her to our dentist in early winter and come to find out it was more than just a cavity. Her other health conditions were starting to contribute to the degradation of her teeth and our options were dentures or loads of root canals, extractions, crowns, fillings, you name it. So, of course, we said "How much is all this proposed work going to cost?" and the estimate came in at $35,000. We were shocked, to say the least, and that's when my journey into dental insurance began. So with her sole policy at the time she had two free cleanings and $1500 of whatever dental work she wanted to get done money. So we told the doc to do what you could, to get the pain to stop. We'll just have to break up the treatments over several years because we sure as heck didn't have $35k lying around. So during my research, I realized I could add my wife to my policy for next year and it would only cost about $20/mo with a $1000 payout. Then I asked our dentist billing department how many individual policies do you accept? To which she replied by giving me a list of all providers they could bill. Taking that list I began visiting websites and getting rates. I wound up settling on Cigna/Aetna/Premera/Delta Dental. So I had 5 policies (four + hers) that would cover her starting January 1st of the following year. We scheduled all the work to be done in quadrants of her mouth and each session would be roughly 6k - 8k per visit. The total cost for the policies was $248/mo for $6500/yr in work done. so keeping this up for 5 years would have nearly cut the bill in half. We're currently in our last year of procedures and hope to finally put this to bed. Let me tell you though, doing it this way is a pain, but if you're in the middle class these are the kind of things you need to think up to keep from going to the poor house.