Traveling to another country has become a common way to beat high medical costs in the United States. Patients seeking dental treatments often look abroad, too, thinking they'll be able to save quite a bit of money. But that's not always the case with dental work. For the most part, even "expensive" procedures like implants are a better deal at a local dental office. Take a look at what implants might require to see why staying local is your best bet.

Overall Costs

First you have to factor in the overall cost of the trip. A local dentist will have a bill at the end, and you'll have to take a few days off work. If you don't have some sort of paid time off that you can use, that will put a dent in your next paycheck. But a dentist abroad will have a bill at the end, plus your days off from work, plus travel costs, and hotel costs. And then there are food and medication costs as well.

You'd have to be saving a substantial amount on the dental work to make up for all of those associated costs. Staying local has an obvious advantage here because you eliminate most of the travel-related bills.

Two-Part Implants

Dental implants require two appointments, several months apart. In the first appointment you have part of the implant placed in your jaw, and then you need to let your jaw heal. Eventually you go back to get the top part of the implant put in place.

Are you really going to want to travel abroad twice for this? That will only exacerbate the list of extra costs you'll have to deal with.

Something Going Wrong

Whether due to a sudden infection or a general sense that the implant isn't healing correctly, the need to see the dentist at the last minute is another reason to stay local. If you go abroad for the work and have to see a local dentist for an emergency, the local dentist won't know exactly what the other dentist did without spending more time examining you. Plus, you'll have to pay the local dentist's fee. If you had had the work done locally and gone back to the same dentist, you might have been able to get reduced or waived bills for that emergency visit.

Need dental implants but worried about the cost? Talk to a local dentist, like Kenai Dental Clinic, who specialize in implants before hopping overseas or across the border. You'll see how dentists in the United States can re-arrange costs and payment schedules to make paying for an implant much easier.

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