I'm not going into dentistry, but I have a family friend that is a dentist and I can speculate as to how I think it will pan out.
The government has it's ever-reaching tentacles all over medicine right now, which is not really a new thing. All while this happens, the dentists for the most part have kept their mouths shut to avoid getting the government's attention, for good reason. An observation I've noticed is that many medical procedures, whether life-saving or not, appear to be "necessary" in the eyes of the general public and of the government; if you deny these procedures due to the inability to pay, you are put in a tough spot as a doctor and you're viewed as a cruel and greedy monster. I'm not trying to influence anyone one way or another as to what is right or wrong, I'm simply pointing out an observation.
On the other hand, dentistry is still fairly cash-based, at least relative to medicine. You go for your check-up and cleaning and afford to pay in cash. The bigger procedures may cost a few thousand dollars, like wisdom teeth extraction for example, but honestly, those are surgical procedures that reflect market forces/prices. Different OMFS guys charge different rates for wisdom teeth extraction and you are free to shop for the best deal. The government hasn't hugely distorted prices and reimbursements for dentists because the government isn't as huge of a player in paying as it is in medicine.
Sure, dental insurance is becoming fairly commonplace these days because it's a benefit package provided with people's salaries from their jobs. In my opinion, this insurance makes it more affordable for people to get procedures done, but at the same time, makes procedures more unaffordable because dentists and dental specialists have to build in the cost of handling insurance companies into their services. It kind of makes things more complicated than they have to be. Why not just increase the person's salary and let them pay for their dentistry out of pocket instead of creating multiple layers of people the money has to go through as well as multiple layers of paperwork? I think that insurance for dental care will grow in the coming years and dentistry will start seeing it's effects. Third party payers distort the market prices and never in favor of the consumer. In my opinion, going with free market prices where individual dentists are creating price wars for your business, which is always the best for you, the consumer.
A big factor in what keeps dentistry from rapidly inflating is the fact that they're not required to treat any random person coming to their office with pain. In hospitals, if you are an illegal alien or a homeless person with a metal spike in your rib cage, they are required by law to help you. If you are one of the previously mentioned people with a broken tooth or severe tooth decay, you still gotta fork over that cash or make payments. The distortion of the market in the medical sector is that the non-payers...don't pay. That leaves the payers making up the difference and it creates this huge ambiguity in calculating the actual market price of your services. Hospitals charge YOU the payer more to make up for the loss of the homeless guy. Now is it wrong to not help the homeless guy with a broken tooth? Not what I'm debating. This is purely an economic analysis of dentistry, not a moral or ethical one.
Countries that have socialized medicine have in some instances socialized dental care. You can never predict how it's going to pan out for dentists here because it doesn't even appear the government has enough money to pay for the health care system they've signed into law. Hell, do we even know if dental care is covered in that phone-book-thick bill? The only certain thing I can tell you is that the pay is likely to go down if dentists get more in bed with the government like physicians have.
