Swish
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:44AM 
Bwaaaahaha.I visited my dentist's office on Monday for a routine teeth cleaning.
The practice charges $119 for one of their excellent hygienists to perform this service.
So naturally, when the ordeal procedure was over and I went up front to pay, clutching my plastic goody bag of two extra-soft toothbrushes, a quarter-sized disc of dental floss, and a runt tube of toothpaste, I expected the receptionist/cashier to say: "The charge is one hundred nineteen dollars today, Mrs. Weber."
Or, "That'll be one hundred nineteen today."
Or, "A hundred and nineteen dollars, please."
Or at the very least, "One nineteen."
But she didn't say any of those things.
Cool as a seldom-used cavitron she enunciated, and I quote: "That will be two-oh-three."
Two-oh-three what? Dollars? For a one-hundred-nineteen-dollar cleaning?
Something seemed to have gone awry. I looked behind me to see if perhaps I had inadvertently volunteered to pay for someone else's dental services in addition to my own. Seeing no one, I asked the extortionist receptionist to explain.
"You had a fluoride rinse and an exam today too," she said.
At $72 an ounce, I might as well swish with Chanel Number Five.
Well, yes. Yes, I suppose I did enjoy a fluoride rinse. My, was it ever tasty. Following my cleaning, I was instructed to swish for sixty seconds with a half-ounce of blue mouthwash that the hygienist dispensed into a plastic thimble from a gallon jug with a pump on the top.
Turns out that half-ounce swish cost me $36.
In case you do not have a calculator handy, allow me to do the math.
The gallon jug contained 128 ounces of fluoride mouthwash. Each dose measures one-half ounce, so that means that there are 256 swigs in the jug.
At $36 per dose, that comes out to $9,216.
I do believe Kryptonite is much cheaper, and makes your teeth look better, and gives you superpowers to boot.
By the way, I checked out some dental supply web sites. The jug of mouthwash cost the dentist about $60.
Who said capitalism is dead?
Forget gold coin! The smart money is on fluoride rinse! It's recession-proof and you get an eight thousand percent return on your investment!
On second thought, is there a dental mafia in Columbia that nobody is telling us about?
When I picked my jaw up off the floor, being careful not to sully my very clean, very expensive teeth, I asked what -- and why -- the "exam" cost me extra.
(See, I was under the impression that the dentist moseying by after your cleaning -- and swishing -- and peering around inside your mouth and asking the hygienist for the lowdown on the happy-camper quotient of your gums and teeth, was all part of the deal. Silly me.)
"That was $48," replied the book-cooker cashier coolly. "He examined your teeth."
Again I was agog and attempted to argue. "He looked inside my mouth for all of ninety seconds," I spluttered. "For the rest of the four minutes he was in the room, we talked about the weather! He must make, like, $3,000 an hour!"
She shrugged and recited automatically: "I think you'll find our prices are competitive."
I don't know about that, but it certainly all added up ... $119 plus $48 plus $36 equals $203.
Still, at $72 an ounce, I might as well swish with Chanel Number Five.
And I can't help but wonder about the street value of that $9,216 bottle of mouthwash.
I'll have to ask the Caped Crusader to look into it ... next time I see him.
Smile!
Reader Comments (5)
I bought a bottle of that 'blue-purple' stuff, and found it's infinitely cheaper at the grocery store ;-)
Anyway, I reckon when Barry & his socialist minions have made hellthscare "free" to all, dentistry will be next...you'll remember fondly when you could GET to the dentist...
Yikes, Dental Shock! Yes, when I worked at the insurance adjuster's office, the only insurance I could afford was dental. It seemed pretty reasonable, and I needed some work done. What nobody told me was that the insurance only covered a reasonable charge. And dentists do not charge reasonably. With insurance, I had to pay $100 for a cleaning; another thing I needed was going to be at least $700 out of pocket. I bought a dishwasher instead. I love it.
@ SF ... see, they don't tell you before they hand you the soupcon of mouthwash that it's going to cost you thousands of times more than retail value. They count on your obedience ... and it pays off BIGTIME. But you raise an interesting point, and one which I in fact have been pondering since yesterday, to wit: what DOES happen to dental care under ObummerCare?
Anyone? Anyone?
@ Tracie ... KEWL! And when your teeth need cleaning, you can just pop them out and put them into that dishwasher. As for me, I think I'll take to scraping my own plaque from my own enamel. My dentist can use the nine-thousand-dollar mouthwash on some other sucker.
This is why I say "Nah, I'm good" when I'm offered the fluoride rinse. And then I pull out of my pocket one of those trial-sized Scope bottles that cost a dollar.
"What DOES happen to dental care under ObummerCare?"
I haven't given it much thought, but my guess is it will go down something like this: We all go to the dentist like usual. The dentist charges the government. The fees will stay the same or even go up, but they surely won't go down. The government, in order to pay for those $36 half-ounce swishes of fluoride rinse, will tax us to death.
In short, we'll pay for it, one way or the other. Only whereas NOW we pay for our own trips to the dentist, under Obamacare we'll get to pay for everyone else, too.
America, ain't it grand.
WOW.
I've never thought to break it down like that.
Although we have socialized medicine here in Canada, we have to pay for our dental visits. My husband's dental plan through work covers some routine stuff but not surgery, root canal, bridges, caps, crowns, braces, etc.
I'm going for a dental check-up tomorrow and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the bill.