Dental Benefits After Retirement
Posted on September 5, 2017 in Dental benefit information
Most people have been planning for retirement for decades, tucking money away in retirement accounts and scheduling vacations. What many people forget to plan for, however, are dental benefits.
Most retirees lose employer-sponsored dental coverage when they leave the workforce. And although the Medicare federal health insurance program is available for people who are over the age of 65, it doesn't cover dental care.1
Unfortunately, when retirees have to pay for dental services out of their own pockets, they sometimes decide to forego dental visits entirely: In fact, nearly 40 percent of seniors did not see a dentist in 2014.2 The decrease in frequency of dental visits can be harmful to older adults' oral health because they often contend with dental issues related to aging, medications and other systemic health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.
But retirees do have options other than paying out-of-pocket. Delta Dental of Illinois offers low-cost individual dental plans designed to meet the unique oral health needs of people of all ages. Visit deltadentalil.me to learn more about our individual dental plan options.
1 http://time.com/money/3960715/dentist-retirement-dental-insurance-medicare/
2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Health, United States, 2015: With Special Feature on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities,” Table 78 (May 2016), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf