It's true that $150k was a lot 20 years ago but the average income of a new grad dentist was only $70-80k/year. It's also true that dental income has not increased since the recession. I have not raised the tx fee since I started my very first office in 2006 because I still need new patients to come in to replace the patients, who are done with their ortho treatments. My base salary from my P/T job at the corp has stayed the same since the recession....and my bonuses have decreased significantly. The reason I bring home more money now than I did in the past is I have less debt (mortage debt is the only debt I have left) to pay back now.
I hope you won't keep making $150k for the rest of your praticing career. I hope you'll think about opening up your own practice some day....and make many times more
There's nothing wrong with working for Walmart, especially when you have a $500k debt to pay back. I currently work for a dental chain, which is no different than working at Walmart's dental offices..... and I am not ashamed of this.
It's good that you have this thinking in your head that you will open your own office some day. You will be fine. When I was a student like you, I never thought that I could ever own a practice because I thought I wasn't good enough...I am shy and anti-social, English is not my first language, and my plan was to practice in superaturated market in CA. That's why before graduation, I sold most of my dental/ortho instruments to my dental classmates and co-residents. I had worked for someone else for 4+ years before I finally had the courage to set up my first office.
For me, this is the early stages of the direction ortho is heading. For starters, let’s look at the $$$. SDC alone did an average of $60-70 million a month the first 6 months of this year. That shows the demand for their products is very very strong. SDC has expanded the network of orthodontists they built within their company pretty significantly as the company went through a rapid growth the past 2-3 years. There will be more orthodontist jobs offered by SDC and the likes as they continue to grow.
I am afraid you won’t be able to because this job will be taken over by robots.
Oooh that's something else. A ton of careers won't exist because of AI in the next 50 years, and a bunch of new careers will possibly be created. I think dentistry is relatively safe though, but I don't see how careers like finance are not at risk, especially when AI can crunch numbers better than humans already.
Walmart announced their first stand-alone medical clinic yesterday.
www.forbes.com
Walmart announced their first stand-alone medical clinic yesterday.
Walmart is launching its first standalone primary care clinic
Walmart Health debuts in Georgia, offering everything from dentistry to mental health therapy, and its dedication to in-person care could pay off.www.businessinsider.com
CVS will follow suit and also announced their new HealthHub concept store will reach four U.S. metropolitan areas and 50 locations by the end of THIS year as part of a major expansion. The HealthHub rollout will grow to 1,500 locations by the end of 2021, or about 500 HealthHubs a year. The HealthHubs are outperforming CVS' traditional stores on a variety of measures. CVS expects Aetna’s more than 22 million health plan members to be guided to CVS stores and the HealthHUBs in particular.
As CVS Rolls Out Health Hubs, Walmart Prepares Clinic Expansion
Walmart may be on the verge of a new wave of clinic expansion in certain markets across the U. S. as its retail pharmacy rivals invest in an array of outpatient healthcare services.
So yes, medicine and dentistry are both being disrupted.
I agree. The narrative of “affordable healthcare” is now being lead by corporations who were not in the healthcare space before.
1st off .... Decide which field interests you the most. This will be your future profession. Hopefully you choose a profession not based solely on income. Next is to complete school with the least amount of debt. I can't speak for medicine, but simply being a dentist does not automatically mean you can easily pay off excessive DS debt.
Frankly speaking, as the middle class gets smaller and smaller in the future, and as more employees opt for HMO plans through their employer health insurance programs (or even qualify for Medicaid) - more and more dentists will have no choice but to accept what the markets dictates. Dentistry is still a good profession today, because the awful changes we hear about today haven’t become widespread yet. It could take 5-10 years before we see them reach most communities. Only 1-2 % of my patients mentioned Smiles Direct Club as alternative to traditional ortho, but I will not be surprised if that number hits 50% or more in a decade, specially for anyone under 35.
This has already happened in medicine. Most medical offices have to accept insurances. Cash-only medical offices don’t exist anymore. And the doctors get paid less than 100 bucks for each office visit. To earn a 6 figure income, the doctors have to see high patient volume and spend less time for each patients. Many doctors have to work 10+ hours a day....just to make the same income as us, dentists. We, dentists, can at least make our patients pay us cash for the procedures that are not covered by their dental insurances. Patients still pay us cash when they don’t have dental insurance. Patients pay an OS $1500-2000 for wisdom teeth extractions. Patients pay an endodontist $1000+ for a molar RCT. More than 50% of my patients, whose dental insurances don’t have ortho coverage, have to pay me cash….and to make the treatments more affordable for my patients, I spread the payments out over the length of the ortho treatment, 18-24 months.
There are over 3 million people with no dental insurance and about 3 million people on Medicaid in my state of 11.5 million people.
It’s a good thing that a lot of people don’t have dental insurance and have to pay us cash. I don’t want the greedy insurance companies to ruin our dental profession the same way they ruin the medical profession….longer wait time for the patients, the doctors have to work harder, and less doctor’s time for each patient etc. It’s also good that most people don’t think dental care is a right and that’s why the lawmakers has not yet passed laws that hurt our profession the way they did to the medical profession.
And many dentists only work 4 days/week and don’t work on weekends….and they still make a killing. I am not talking about the dentists who graduated 20 years ago. Rainee and Coldfront are among these more recent grad dentists.
The doctors have to work a lot more hours than dentists. So if you calculate the hours a doctor works and the amount he gets paid, it’s much less than what most of us dentists/dental specialists make per hour. For example, a general surgeon only gets $3-400 to remove an appendix....and when he is not in the OR to operate on the patients, he has to work at his office to do consults and post op checks. My cousin is anesthesiologist….the hospital woke him up at 2am to do an epidural on a patient, who had medicaid….and he only got $200 for that. My brother is a GI doc and to make more money, he had to move out of CA.
Yes. Most of us are talking about physicians in solo private practice.
It depends on the specialty you are in. For anesthesiologists like my cousin, the hospitals don’t pay them anything. My cousin has to bill the patients’ insurances directly. So he doesn’t get the whole $200 for that epidural. A small % of that will go to the biller, whom he hires to bill the insruances for him. And if the patients don’t have insurance, he still has to treat them to save their lives. He will send them a bill but the chance for these un-insured patients to pay the bill is almost zero. The hospital pays him a small amount when he is on call but according to him, it’s so little that it’s not worth spending a night at a hospital away from his wife and kids. Another bad thing about his job is in order to get more cases, he also has to be nice to the surgeons… the same way we, orthodontists, are to our referring dentists.
It depends on how hard you work and how good of a dentist you are. I’ve seen recent grad dentists and orthodontists who are doing extremely well. They graduated way after me and owed more in student loans than me but they are doing much better than me. But I also seen dentists who have very poor people skills and hand skills and have to be let go by their bosses multiple times.
True. I think the general public were mislead by a lot of bad information out there. I remember when I was applying to dental shoot 13 years ago, The US News & World Report magazine was heavily marketing the income of dentists by ranking it as the #1 of all profession in this country. I believe to this date, they are still doing that one form or another. I never understood their methodology - specially when you factor in the cost of attendance to go to dental school. Is dentistry really in the top 10 (or even 20) best paying jobs in this country relative to debt? Parents are still pushing their kids to go to dental school and even specialize, with no emphasis on the unbearable debt that comes with that plan. Personally, this ploy is the biggest highlight of the profession today and in the future.
I know many offices that are owned by asian dentists here in Orange County charge similar low fees and they are doing very well. $675 for a crown at Walmart is actually expensive. These dentists can easily beat Walmart....lower fee, honesty, no overtreatment BS, and better parient care. Keeping the overhead low is key.
What do you think has been the key for the orthos who you say have done better than you since graduating?
Better marketing, better customer service, better communication with the referring GPs, and higher treatment fees. An ortho office that is located just 1 block away from my office had 65 starts during the peak month of July. I knew because the assistant, who works full time at that ortho office, works for me 2 Saturdays a month. I had 47 starts during that same month and I thought I did very well.
Are these doctors foreign grads with zero debt? How can they manage to pay their overhead with ridiculously low fees?
Most of them are first generation Asian Americans. Many of them came to the US when they were young children after the Vietnam war as political refugees. They were young enough to adapt to the American way of life very quickly but old enough to understand their parents' culture and language. Their parents barely spoke any English and had to work more than one minimum wage job to support the family. Because their parents didn't make enough, they had to work P/T during HS and college years to pay for books, clothes, and car maintenances. They had to take out student loans to pay for their dental education. When they became dentists, working on the weekends and having low paying jobs (ie charging their patients low fees, accepting medicaid etc) were no big deal to them. They'd rather make a little less per patient and have fully booked schedules 5-6 days/week than sitting around doing nothing. Little amounts add up to bigger amounts. That's how they pay off their debts fast. Asian people are afraid of debts. During the 2008 recession, the cities that have the highest Asian populations (ie Diamond Bar, Rowland Heights, Garden Groves, Westminster, Irvine etc) had very low home foreclosure rates.
I thought Walmart would not do this (of all places) in SoCal - the Las Vegas of dental offices.
