Benefits with teeth: dental plans keep workers smiling.

• Author: Gilbert, Jo
• Position: Dental insurance benefits to workers

Employers who like to see workers smile should consider this: Dental care is, overall, a fairly inexpensive benefit to add to existing packages. According to Jim Stanbrough of Delta Dental Plan of Indiana, the cost is usually 5 to 10 percent of what a medical program costs. And for that small investment, companies get a large return in employee satisfaction.

"It's a benefit that works for them," he says. "With most other benefits, you don't get anything unless something happens: You get sick, you get in an accident or you die. Only then do those benefits work for you."

When considering establishing a dental benefits plan, employers have a few different options. They can opt for regular insurance, self-fund and administer the benefit themselves, or combine the two.

With a traditional package, employees may use a dentist of their preference. This type of program, generally, has higher premiums, but the employees have freedom of choice.

As the health-care industry moves to a more managed-care approach, so does dentistry. With a managed-care type of dental program, employees are given a list of participating providers, and often get better benefits for lower premiums. Employers can save 15 to 25 percent in premiums by using a managed-care system over a traditional package.

The savings occur "because the dentists have agreed to accept a lesser fee than they would ordinarily," Stanbrough says, "because potentially they may get more volume of patients vs. if they were not a member."

While managed care doesn't offer quite as much choice as a standard plan, there's another way to achieve total choice, says Jim Woolf of CompDent Corp. in Indianapolis. With a combination plan, employees specify at the time of enrollment whether they want to continue going to their dentist (even though the dentist may not be part of the network), or go with a managed-care system.

There's yet another option that some companies find attractive: self funding. "Dental health care is predictable and preventive in nature," says Jim Gould, director of dental benefit services at the Indiana Dental Association, "whereas medical can be catastrophic." Because dental care is predictable, and not everyone uses it anyway, companies may find they save by foregoing the premiums and instead self funding.

Simply, a non-insurance direct-reimbursement program uses an expense-account approach. An employee goes to a dentist of his or her choice, pays the bill, obtains a receipt to present...