Yesterday, I received an email from the National Association of Dental Laboratories (NADL), outlining this problem with Chinese dental lab products.
They pointed me to their website to get updates on the story. When I got there, the story and updates were only available to NADL paying menbers with a site user account. Pretty useless.
Do a search online for dental labs; you should get plenty of hits. Dig a little deeper and look for fee schedules or price lists. You won’t find many. The story was much different, even 5 years ago. Lots of labs published their prices.
The dirty little secret is that the $600 - $1200 you paid to a dentist for a crown has a lot of in dental office markup.
In most cases when a dental office sends out crown work, the cost of a crown from a domestic dental lab to that same dentist is $80 to $250. (I know some of the folks getting $250, they are very exacting artists/craftsmen, worth every penny. They represent a very small fraction of the work sold in the US today) Work sent overseas commands as little as $55. Sure, the dentist did a crown prep and took impressions, and then cemented the restoration into place, but did he really deserve that huge markup?
The story also seeks to portray the dentists as victims of underhanded dental labs, both domestic and foreign. What a crock. Did anyone seek to find out just what percentage of dental work sent to China from the US is sent by labs and what percentage is sent directly by dentists? Of course not, or the average dentist greed would be shown to be even more pronounced.
Did you know that it is illegal in most states for a dental lab to deal directly with the public? Some latitude is allowed for labs to take shades for restorations which are prescribed by dentists, and some very few states have denturist legislation, whereby people can get lower cost dentures.
Dentistry is a closed shop. Break a tooth out of a denture and a dental lab can’t help you without a dentist’s prescription. The lab may charge a dentist $50 for the single tooth repair. How much does the dentist then charge the patient?
Your kid loses his retainer after orthodontic treatment. The lab bills the dentist for less than $45 for an average retainer. How much did the dental office charge the parents for the replacement?
Dental technicians are unregulated. Anyone can call himself a dental technician. Reputable technicians have tried for years to institute minimal standards for their profession, but to little success. The dentist lobby has blocked most of these attempts. Ask a dentist why.
The NADL has has an adjunct, the National Board for Certification, or NBC. It sponsors a voluntary certification process, which awards the title of CDT or Certified Dental Technician, to successful candidates.
Some states, such as Texas, require that dental labs in their state have at least one CDT in the lab operating in Texas. There are no broad requirements for all dental technicians in their state.
Did you know that there are no specific standards for US dentists who do their own lab work? I have seen the lab work of many dentists, few could meet the standards of the voluntary CDT program. Neither the states nor the state components of the American Dental Association seem interested in regulating dental technology as performed by dentists, nor establishing objective criteria for the regulation of dental technology.
Caveat emperator, let the buyer beware.
Ping for later reference.
My wife needs a crown replacement. This is good information. I’ve already gone to the NADL site for more.
Many thanks.
$145.00. I know because I put my retainer through the dryer by mistake.It shrank. It was one of those clear plastic ones, and it cost $145.00 to replace.