Province introduces dental fee guide to take a bite out of higher bills

A review of dental fees in Alberta released Thursday has confirmed what patients like Ambrose Blum have long suspected — prices are significantly higher and skyrocketing faster than anywhere else in Canada.

“It’s like fixing a car,” said Blum, adding high fees prompted him to have his teeth worked on only by students at the University of Alberta School of Dentistry. “You had to shop around. It was all over the board.”

In mid-2015, following years of complaints of costly work and lack of transparency, Health Minister Sarah Hoffman launched a review of the province’s dental fees.

Based on the results, Hoffman announced the government will create a public dental fee guide to be released sometime in 2017. Alberta became the only province without a dental fee guide when the Alberta Dental Association and College stopped publishing a suggested fee guide in 1997.

The province also released a report of average dental fees in 2016 for the most common procedures that can be used as a reference for Albertans. It’s available at http://www.health.alberta.ca/health-info/dental-fees.html

Hoffman said she stopped short of releasing a fee schedule that would have regulated prices.

“We looked at what every other province is doing because affordability is the issue in Alberta, and in no other province have they brought forward that level of precision, but they have been able to get things more affordable,” Hoffman said.

“We wanted to get the best value but also enable consumers to shop around at the same time.”

The results showed Alberta’s dental fees can be as much as 44-per-cent higher than in neighbouring provinces on average, based on 49 commonly used procedures. However, in three specific common procedures — recall exams (checkups), prevention (polishing, scaling and peridontal appliances) and crowns — fees in Alberta were consistently higher.

Fees for checkups in Alberta are 146 per cent higher than British Columbia, 112 per cent higher than Ontario and 106 per cent higher than Saskatchewan.

Mintoo Basahti, president-elect of the Alberta Dental Association and College, said dentists in Alberta face higher costs than in other provinces because employees are more expensive and sterilization standards are the highest in Canada.

“There’s a number of studies out there that show that the net take-home for dentists in Alberta is comparable to dentists across the country,” Basahti said.

“It’s not as if those higher initial fees are translating into higher net take-homes.”

The review said hygienists are paid $12 to $18 an hour more than in the rest of the country and assistants are paid up to $10 an hour more.

In Alberta, office costs amounted to 69.8 per cent of dental-fee billings, while net profit totalled 30.2 per cent, the dental fee review said. In B.C., office costs were 69.3 per cent and net profit 30.7 per cent while in Saskatchewan, it was 68.6 per cent and 31.4 per cent.

Red Deer dentist Michael Zuk called the fee guide a “ceremonial gesture” that will end up costing patients more.

“It will have a negative effect on patients with a single dental plan,” Zuk said. “The insurance companies will take this as an opportunity to use a lower fee guide to reimburse at a lower level and dentists won’t be using that as their guide. They’ll say I’ll knock a little off, but I’m not matching that fee guide. Now, there will be a bigger difference the patient has to cough up.”

The introduction of a fee guide was lauded by Frank Swedlove, president and CEO of Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association Inc. “Employers and the 1.8 million Albertans on dental plans that work for them are clearly concerned about the high cost of dental treatments in the province,” he said in a release.

Hoffman also asked the dental association to submit a plan on improving public confidence in the profession and find ways to address concerns and confusion about dentists’ advertising guidelines.

bmah@postmedia.com 

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