The path to escaping dental insurance networks.

00:00:00
So, as you might be aware, dental insurance is in a really weird place right now. Um, it used to be a foundational aspect of health care, especially in dentistry. Um, it used to provide value in the sense that people could pay monthly fees to the insurance companies and they could get affordable dental care um, just by paying those fees. But now what we’re seeing is that the buyers of insurance, the people who rely on insurance for treatments, the coverage that insurance provides has been the same since the 1960s.

00:00:35
It hasn’t gone up with inflation. It hasn’t gone up with the costs of living. While premiums have gone up, so people are paying more for less coverage. And many times I think the statistic is like around 15% of coverage that is necessary doesn’t get uh insurance just flat out denies it. And on the provider side as well we see insurance becoming very frustrating to work with as the reimbursement rates drop. And while we struggle, the dentists struggle, the insurance companies record highs in

00:01:13
profits. So what are we to do if this middleman that has been offering the value to patients and value to providers they start acting greedy? Well, what we can do is we can try to replace it. And when we see what insurance was actually doing, what the purpose was, what it was was to help people find affordable healthcare. It’s to help them find a dentist. And so the dentists who were in network with these insurance companies were basically leveraging insurance as a marketing um method, a marketing system.

00:01:49
And I think the number comes out to about $400,000 per year. That’s what dentists are expected to or that that’s the expected costs, the opportunity costs of being in network considering how much you could be make making based on the treatments that are provided. And um yeah, so you’re you’re paying basically $400,000 a year for a marketing company that is reducing the the payments that you receive and also is providing a worse service to your actual patients. So that’s one of the

00:02:25
reasons why um dentists are leaving in in droves. uh in 2024 25% of dentists had left left the networks and in 2025 that number rose to 29% and 2026 I expect that to go up way higher. So when we remove this middleman who was responsible for connecting us with patients the next step obviously is to replace it to to find a a system that can get you patients. And so dentists have been trying to source their own marketing and for the most part the landscape in dental marketing is so convoluted that it gets very difficult

00:03:09
to understand what needs to be done. So we have big companies who are still promoting SEO very authoritative companies who’ve been around for a long time. So, it’s very easy to trust, but then you realize that SEO is all they do. And so, regardless of its effectiveness, of course, they’re going to promote it. And there’s studies showing that around 2016, 2018, that’s when Google effectively replaced SEO, sort of making it not really relevant anymore, yet it’s still being promoted.

00:03:42
Or we do things like Google reviews. Now because Google replaced SEO with Google business profiles, we go and try to get more reviews. But the problem there is that it’s very cheap and easy to incentivize reviews. So now everyone has good reviews. And so that stops becoming a competitive advantage. And so we move on to the next thing. We we focus on social media because it’s free and also it gives us a lot of numbers which we love. Like you could post a short and get a thousand views. Uh but the problem

00:04:14
is that social media rewards content that keeps users scrolling. It’s about just engagement and entertainment rather than the content that your patients need in order to actually visit you, right? And and so with this convolution and and if you’re experienced, you get to the end of the end of the rabbit hole where you realize, okay, these platforms have designed these systems so that now if you want to play, you sort of have to pay them. Uh back in the day you could do you could get by with more free

00:04:44
tactics because those platforms were trying to get bigger but once they reach you know critical mass of users then they stop caring and it’s about profitability for them and you realize that now you have to pay them. So we turn to advertising and it kind of works but it is getting worse in how it shows up in how it um in the effectiveness right you have more people flock to advertising because it’s the last thing that works. So with more competition there, you have increased costs of advertising as more people want to bid

00:05:18
for the same keywords or the same people and you have lowered margins because now someone’s willing to it’s an auction system. are now willing someone to pay more to get the same advertisement spots and many other effects like 52% of Americans leaving um the advertising space by installing ad blockers and and all these things. So basically marketing is getting very tricky to do and it is um kind of a dead end. So faced with this issue of insurance not being there for us anymore, turning to marketing and realizing that

00:06:02
it’s not really working anymore either. And we have to realize that the problem is that we’re focused so much on visibility cuz that was a strategy back in the day as well that the demand for dentistry outweighed the supply of dentistry. So all you had to do was become visible and you would be able to connect with patients, right? And that’s what insurance companies did back in the day. But today that’s not the case anymore. Like there are record numbers of dental institutions, dental programs opening

00:06:35
up, dental schools opening up, and dental students are graduating in record numbers. And this is a trend that’s been increasing since 1990. So for over two decades the number of dentists joining the workforce has gone up like um an insane amount and so the supply of dentists has increased whereas the demand for dentistry has actually decreased and most people who are seeking dentistry so like working age adults the number of dental visits per year is at a low and people are citing their ability to pay and costs as a big

00:07:17
issue to actually seeking dental treatments. So, it’s not about visibility anymore. If you show up with visibility, you’re still looking at a market that is too crowded with people who don’t want more of the same thing, right? So, we have to take a fundamentally different approach. And that approach is going to be innovating upon the status quo way of doing dentistry of changing how you actually of what you provide and of course there’s treatments but let’s put that aside. What are the other things people

00:07:48
are looking for when they go to a dental office providing that and now presenting that in a way that people realize that okay this office is different right so that is the new game that we have to do. We have to not just show up as another dentist and then seek visibility. Because when we do that, we’re just another commodity and now we’re paying to just be another choice. It’s like if you ever went to a um a a night market or somewhere in like let’s say Southeast Asia, there’s rows and rows of vendors

00:08:23
selling food and hoping that you pick them. And that’s kind of how we show up if we only focus on visibility. The alternative approach is to create something fundamentally different, innovate value in a way that no other provider provides and then show people how that’s the case and the people who want that will be attracted and that is the new playbook. All right. So to sum up, insurance obviously as we know is at a really weird point really weird point. It is doing really weird things and I don’t know if it’s going to

00:09:03
be the way forward anymore. And in order to replace insurance, which was serving as a middleman of connecting people with us, we’re going to have to do our own marketing. And marketing can’t be visibility because of commoditization, because supply has increased, supply of dentists has increased, demand for dentistry is decreasing. We have to shift marketing away from being just visibility and we have to look at it through the lens of how can we attract patients by innovation. Right? So innovation of

00:09:37
value has to be the cornerstone of what we need to do in order to attract more patients. Right? And and this is very obvious. This seems very obvious, but this is a path that not many people take and not many people know how to take because it’s not very clear. How do you innovate value? Right? So, in this video, it’s more of an overview of what needs to be done um for the actual value and how to innovate that itself. I’m working on a course. I should be done with it hopefully within

00:10:08
a month or two and I’ll have that out for you and you’ll walk you’ll be able to walk through every step you need to figure that out. And then presentation of that new value. How can we show up not just as a commodity because if you have the best thing but you look the same as everyone else it’s going to be very difficult. But how do we do that work of now marketing in that aspect? How do we do positioning? How do we put ourselves in the minds of the prospects in a certain place that is distinct from

00:10:36
everyone else? Right? The ideas of differentiation and we’ll go over all those concepts too. But yeah, that’s it for this video. Hope you find it helpful. Stop focusing on visibility. focus more on the innovation of value that you bring to patients and that’s going to be the only way you stand out in a crowded market.