I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth,
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed,
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.
etc...

Pam Ayres

A Trip to the DentistIn the USA, almost everyone pays for almost everything and most people have a whole array of insurance policies to cover almost everything that one can think of. This includes medicine and dentistry. The UK has the NHS, which, despite its problems, makes me proud to be British. In the UK, we would pay about £13 each for a scale and polish for the adults and, as one would expect, it was always free for the children. The government payed the rest. The bill for our family trip to the dentist, for a similar amount of treament, in the USA was about $1500 plus an extra $500 or so of treatment that would most probably not have been prioritised by a UK dentist. Of this $2000, we had to part with $130 and the dental insurance policy covered the rest. The great thing about the NHS is that medical treatment is completely free and dental treatment is almost free for anyone regardless of socioeconomic status.


A Brit with Bad TeethHowever, my recent State-side trip to the dentist has highlighted something that one can see in this and in other aspects of American life that is rarer in British life. This is the relationship between service providers and their recipients: that if one is paying for something up-front, one is likely to demand and therefore to receive a better quality of service. This is great for those who can afford it or have an employer who can afford it, but is less great for those who are less fortunate.

The USA seems to run on this principle. At the dentist, our initial "oral evaluation" was far more thorough than anything that I have ever experienced in the UK, with an emphisis on prophylactic treatment. In addition, the dentists/hygenists themselves are more polite and friendly. They realise that one can always take one's custom elsewhere, which is less easy to do in the UK.

While we're on the topic of teeth, what is the going rate for teeth at the moment?

When in England, our tooth fairy always used to give £1 per tooth. On the odd occasion, he'd forget to do his job, so we would have to negotiate compensation for his lateness to the tune of a 100% per tooth markup. Since moving to the US, the rate has been $1 per tooth, with the same penalty for lateness. However, we recently found out that Emily's friend's tooth fairy pays $5 per tooth. In addition, we were recently
Larry Davidwatching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (one of the funniest programmes ever) wherein Susie's daughter, Sammi, has lost her last baby tooth and Susie is trying to put a $5 bill under her pillow (with disastrous consequences resulting from Larry using the upstairs loo very noisily whilst wearing very squeaky shoes). Is our tooth fairy particularly stingy? Should we be negotiating a better deal for our kids while they still have baby teeth to lose?