I have gone to Dr. Levine and Madison Dental for 20 years or so. They have always been great in terms of care - very careful and thoughtful. No complaints there. So, 4-5 stars for the quality of care. Why only 2 stars?
On my most recent visit, when I began checkout, they told me I owed over $300 for the cleaning, which in the past has always been covered by my insurance. When I raised that point, their office administrator said that they were no longer in-network with my carrier. I asked if that was a recent change, because everything had been covered at my prior appointment, just six months ago. The (very nice) gentleman scrunched up his eyebrows and said "no, it's not very recent at all." He also said that my insurance carrier was supposed to have sent out a notice that Madison Dental was no longer in network. But "don't worry," he told me, "we will submit to your insurance for out of network benefits" (that just gets applied against my out of pocket annual maximum, so it's no help, which I'm sure he knew). With no other choice, I paid the money.
When I called my insurance carrier, they indicated that Madison Dental had left their network about a week and a half prior to my most recent visit (so actually, very recently) and had been told at the time that their provider contract obligated them to alert their patients that they were no longer taking the insurance. When I called Madison Dental back, the (again, very nice) office administrator, who I suppose didn't think I'd follow up with anyone, got flustered and yammered something unintelligible about how they submitted paperwork in April to leave the network, but my insurance carrier had made a mistake on their end, blah, blah . . . And he flatly denied being told that it was their responsibility to tell anyone that they no longer took the insurance. Why they should have to have been told that, I don't know. It's just common courtesy.
A silver lining is that I resisted some fairly overt, repeated pressure during my visit to get unnecessary panoramic x-rays (my one quibble is that Madison Dental overuses radiation diagnostics - insisting on them more frequently than recommended by the ADA not because there is anything wrong, but just because time has passed). Had I not done so, I'm sure the overall bill would have been $1000 or more, which I'd have been much more pissed off about.
So, anyway, they don't apparently think it's up to them to tell a patient that he is now paying out of pocket until after they provide service, which gives them at least one chance to get a full-freight charge for whatever that service is, and they pressure you to get more service than you need to amp up the bill even further. I don't think this is anything specific to them - a lot of health care providers are just getting frustrated with insurance and going off-network or opening "concierge" practices so they don't have to subsist on whatever insurance reimburses them for. But they've handled the transition pretty badly, and gaslit me while doing it, which doesn't feel good. I'll get a new dentist going forward, which is annoying, but that's how it goes, I guess. read more