Monday, April 23, 2012

Is Your Health Plan “Reform Ready” for Dental?


By Dennis Leonard

If you’re with a health plan, it’s a pretty sure guess you’ve spent many hundreds of hours over the past 18 months studying the Affordable Care Act to understand how it will impact your business. I know that because we’ve spent that much time and more studying the ACA’s dental mandate for children, and how it will impact our dental benefit business and the relationships we have as the third party dental administrators for our health plan clients. The ACA requires an additional 27 million children be covered by dental insurance in 2014. Many of these children are considered “high risk” and have been without dental insurance coverage and oral care. This fact will surely impact the business of health plans across the country.

What are the implications of this mandate for health plans? What are the components of dental benefits design both on the front and back end that health plans should be aware of?

We can answer these questions. Next Tuesday, April 24th, DentaQuest will host a webinar to address the oral health implications of health care reform and advise members of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national trade association representing the health insurance industry, how to best manage them.

The session will guide health plan executives on reevaluating whether their health plan business is reform ready for dental, and will feature our in-house experts in dental benefits administration, market intelligence, and management of clinical outcomes with higher-risk populations.

By the end of the webinar, participants will be armed with good information to guide their strategy for incorporating dental, or expanding their dental benefits offerings while meeting the requirements of the ACA’s dental mandate for children.

This free webinar is also available to the public, so please, register here!