Joseph Denning, DDS
There is a specter haunting dentistry: the specter of commoditization. I don’t know about you, but when I hang out at dental meetings or social gatherings, or browse Facebook dental forums, I see some disturbing trends. We are a group of people who—I know this is a gross generalization—have gotten pretty good at feeling sorry for ourselves. This growing list of laments should sound familiar to you: PPO reimbursements are going down, student loans are insurmountable, the appointment book has never been so empty, and so on. In essence, what I hear everyone saying is, “Dentistry is not what it used to be.” And it’s true. So let’s just get over it! Only after we have acknowledged that things are never going back to the way that they once were can we begin to gain control over the direction that our profession is heading.
Dentists are making less money on average than they were about a decade ago. According to Marko Vujicic, PhD, the chief economist and vice president of the American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute, “After adjusting for inflation, the average annual net income of general practice dentists was $174,780 in 2014, compared with $219,738 in 2005.”1 This is no surprise when you consider that insurance reimbursement rates decreased by 10.4% nationally from 2005 to 2014.1
Also, it is common knowledge that dentists are graduating with more debt. When the American Dental Education Association surveyed the class of 2016, the average debt per graduating senior was $261,149.2 This means that if a 25-year repayment plan with a 6% interest rate is chosen, the average dentist graduating today will have a monthly payment of $1,682.59 and pay more than half a million dollars for the total cost of the loan before repayment is finished. In short, this is a perfect storm hitting the next generation of dentists.
No comments:
Post a Comment