King Kevin

[kevin_standlee]

...because I'm now crowned. Twice (rearmost two lower right teeth), plus the one I already have. And another in the pipeline, as my dentist looked at the chipped tooth and said it's going to need a crown, too, although if it doesn't get any worse, maybe we can hold off until January. I really need to do that unless there's a major failure, because I've used up my entire dental benefit and exhausted my HCSA/FSA for this year. (In retrospect, I should have put aside $4K instead of $3K in my FSA; however, since you lose anything you don't use in the calendar year, I'm leery of over-withholding. How the heck are you supposed to predict these things? FSA's shouldn't expire every calendar year!) Everything resets in January and I'll come back then to get tooth 29 crowned.

The crowns feel funny, but I think that's because I now have gold-crown-on-gold-crown contact, on account of the upper tooth that was already crowned after the root canal earlier this year. I need to get used to the slightly different way my teeth mesh now, and try to not use that premolar for the next five months.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"How the heck are you supposed to predict these things?"

That's exactly the point; they want you to gamble. They want you to feel like an entrepreneur. That's the new model: pretending that you're in charge of your life, to make you feel responsible for the unpredictabilities of fate. If you fail, that'll just teach you that you should have planned better. Be born to wealthy parents and then become a vulture capitalist like Mitt Romney, 'cause if you don't, you're a fool.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

"Ooh, new teeth" said Dr Who TEN(nant). I'm also slowly working my way through this kind of process. Only one permanent ceramic crown in place yet. Since I want implants for two missing top teeth we're putting medium term plastic ones in the teeth that need protecting from further deterioration in the meantime because the bracing and implants will change the bite, and these crowns are expensive, so I don't want to have to replace any of them soon.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

calimac and kevin_standlee seem to understand that the US system of paying for healthcare is deeply broken. I don't understand why millions of Americans just can't see how horribly f**ked up your system is. There are at least three or four basic variants of how to pay for healthcare in the rest of the developed world. No one else has the US system (though the current UK plutocrats seem bent on trying to go there) but most USians still believe that their system is the best in the world, despite every statistic showing that it isn't (if you're a multi-millionaire in dollars you can get the best healthcare anywhere you want, for the rest of the population you need a system that doens't screw you over when you get ill, or screw you over when you don't but try to plan for if you might, as the US one does).
Japan has a very different system to the UK, but at least I get the tax back on all my medical expenses in the year, no matter how much they are. I assume this is the issue here?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We had a better system. Not perfect by any means, but better. It had small up-front co-payments and/or deductibles, and anything over that was paid by insurance. Now that's being replaced by these "health care spending accounts," which put you in charge of guessing how much money you'll need to spend on health care in the upcoming year, with incentives in the form of not covering anything above that (other than catastrophic care, at least, I hope) and losing any money that you don't spend. This is supposed to put you in charge, but what it puts you in charge of is a rigged game with rules you didn't write.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

I take it by "we had a better system" you mean simply that you had a system better than the one you have now, rather than that it used to be better than other countries'?
It seems from the outisde that it's always had serious problems such as impossible to afford premiums for small businesses, particularly the self-employed. This latest change is just the next step along the road of the idiocy of thinking of it as "insurance".

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, better than the current system. Almost every civilised country has a better system than the US does.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Glad the work was finally done - and very much am there with you about the dental costs. Our dental only covered the 1st 3 crowns - the last one that became a root canal was all out of pocket. [sighs] I just hope the rest of MY teeth hold out until January. Good luck for your own teeth!

[retro-rider55.livejournal.com]

- you get in a lot of fights when you were younger? 'chipped teeth'? :P

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* This chip is on the inside point of the third tooth from the right rear of my lower teeth, so it would have been quite a trick. In this particular case, I felt the pointy part of the tooth chip off while eating breakfast cereal last week.

The other lower crowns are more or less preventative: both teeth had two old filling in them, and X-rays showed tiny fracture lines starting to form between them. Without the crowns, eventually the teeth might have shattered, which would have been very bad. As it stands now, with a nice pair of gold crowns over them, I expect them to last out the duration.