A couple weeks ago, I went to the dentist for a cleaning/examination to address tooth pain.
The X-ray took about 2 minutes to take and was really simple. I saw my insurance statement and found it was billed $80 for the X-Ray. I decided from that to write on why that 2 minutes ended up costing $80 or a little over 3x what the average person makes in an hour.
Figuring out why an X-ray cost this much, I needed to learn a bit more about dentist, the x-ray machine itself and the people who do the x-rays.
First up, I went to a solo dental practice which appeared to only have one dentist running the practice and other staff there for cleanings and so on.
I looked up how many patients the average dentist gets and found it was 12 a day.
That’d average on a 50 week work year, 3,000 patients visited. It’s also important to know the average dentist has 1,600-2,300 regular patients that they see at least once every 3 years.
This gives us an idea of walkthrough and how many people come into a dentist daily.
Next up, the machines.
For this, I just decided to use the machine they used on me, which was Vatech PaXi 3D Green and the cost online varied, but saw one available for $109,000.
It’s also very likely they got this on a loan, where the average X-ray machine loan is paid back in 4 years and the average interest rate on medical equipment is 9%.
That sets the cost on the machine to $130,000 over 4 years.
That’d require 1,625 patients to pay $80 for that $130,000 to be paid off. About 7 months of what the average dentist would see a year.
It’s also important to know that the vast majority of patients aren’t going in and getting an X-Ray. The American Dental Association recommends one every 36 months and many people with multiple cavities get one done and they get 5 visits after.
That does make it a little harder, because the 1,625 visits to pay the debt on the machine off may not come that quick.
After that, the cost of actually hiring a person to do the X-ray, because very rarely the dentist does it themselves.
My X-Ray was done by a dental hygienist working there and the average salary is $77,210 a year for them in NY.
Let’s just go with 50 working weeks and 40 hours a week for an hourly pay of $38.50.
Best way to see how this adds cost is like this.
A dentist sees 3,000 people a year and likely the hygienist had some role in all of those. Keeping that hygienist paid the average in NY, it’d require $25.66 a patient to go directly to the hygienist.
And this is a foundation for why something like an X-ray which takes 2 minutes to do ends up costing $30.
Dentist or dental offices only get a few thousand customers a year.
The machines themselves cost normally over $100,000.
The people who do the actual test make 48% more than the average American.
And that’s before the dental office needs to pay for front desk staff, rent, electricity, insurance, maintenance of equipment and hey, trying to make a freaking profit off the whole thing.
The reason I like writing on this type of stuff is in two points.
- It’s kind of amazing how 2 minutes can cost $80 and still possibly lead to X-rays losing money for a practice.
- The reason everything in medicine is expensive and that’s normally people leaving. I got my x-Ray and cleaning here, but opted for a different dentist after they said they’d only do one tooth at a time and can only start in September. I doubt I was the first or last person to get an X-Ray and go somewhere else. Same way a lost of different things in healthcare happen and people leaving likely requires them to raise cost on early testing for medicine.
Writing this, numbers are going to change due to machines being different, labor in different states/cities being different and some patients take longer for scans. That said, it’s still interesting to breakdown how the machines after factoring in labor could take tens of thousands of visits and possibly a decade to pay off while keeping some profit margin.
And for anyone curious what the results were on these x-rays in what I need done…
This is the x-ray of a man who requires 4 root canals, one tooth completely pulled/replaced and like 5-10 cavities.
I swear, I brush 2-3x a day, floss, eat very minimal sugar, don’t smoke, haven’t had soda in close to 5 years and to my knowledge don’t do anything which would cause an issue with my teeth.