Hello, I am living with my wife in Zurich. We are looking for a dental insurance for our children, who are currently 3 and 2 years old. I have a couple of questions.
I am looking for an orthodontic-only insurance, and the general sentiment seems to be that driving to Germany every time is not worth it compared to finding a local orthodentist. Our children’s teeth are currently fine, but both my wife and I eventually needed correction when we were younger, so I think it’s wise to assume that orthodontic insurance for our children might be helpful.
When shopping for options I found the following problems:
It seems hard to find an “ortho only” dental insurance. Almost all offers I found include extras for checkup, dental treatments, cleaning, root extractions, etc, which is nice I guess, but surely you overpay that.
The coverage for dental correction (braces) seems… low? For example, I found (relatively expensive) offers with Helsana that only cover “50% of the cost, up to 1000 CHF per year”. Braces can easily go up to 15k CHF over three years, so that’s clearly not enough.
Many insurers are relatively opaque in terms of what’s the maximum age at which you can insure a child without the need of a medical examination. I had to call and ask explicitly, and it seems that for most the cutoff is 5 years (although for some is 3). Clearly it does not make sense to insure a child before that age, unless you have dental problems that already manifest that early, right?
In any case, it seems to me that most insurers adopt a variable premium, which is very low for small children (5-6 years old) and then increases a lot during prepuberty. Which seems convenient… for them. Is it so difficult to find insurance with fixed premium?
Does anyone have some good offer to recommend? For what it is worth, we are currently with Swica for our basic health insurance, but I am planning to switch this year, probably to Helsana.
In my opinion the best orthodontic cover is the one offered by Groupe Mutuel.
The kids plan offers orthodontic cover a 75% up to a maximum of 15 000 chf per year.
Thank you, that’s very helpful! Did you buy this insurance fro your kids? How old are they? Can you tell me if the price is fixed? (I assume not, it looks too cheap to be true)
We used it and were very happy with the service. My son has lovely teeth now thanks to the braces he had when he was 14, he didn’t require a massive amount of work but we were reimbursed 75% of the cost of it all by the insurance.
The price increases as they get older but even the maximum isn’t a huge amount compared to the cost of braces. Of course you run the risk of paying for it for years without ever needing to use it but that’s the case with all insurance.
There have also been a not insignificant number of cases where unscrupulous dentists have recommended orthodontics when either the child was too young, or they weren’t needed.
(A clue to whether this has happened to your child is that at every visit, they take your money but don’t actually ever adjust anything).
This. Often they will refer you to paediatric orthodontics and it’s covered on insurance. Ours was partially covered in this way because it would have interfered with the development of the jaw with age. As it was sorted out while the jaw was still not fully formed and was growing, it was a “relatively” simple fix rather than a full jaw-breaker job as an adult.
I the premium was fixed, it would start out very high as the chance of paying out for braces is close to 100% in Zurich, they have to collect the 15k from somewhere.
Just out of curiosity, what is the premium amount in CHF per year roughly for a teen in treatment with 75% coverage? Our was too old to get by without dentist assessment, so we directly opted to go abroad.
Even ‘mild’ cases can be eye wateringly expensive and there are an awful lot of cases which are classed as ‘mild’ as they are deemed to be cosmetic rather than medically necessary.
If I remember rightly we were paying around 12chf per month by the end but it’s a few years ago now.
We certainly got our money’s worth as he was ten when we arrived and 14 when he had the brace fitted. We had to do the dental exam which didn’t show any concerns at the time but his upper canine milk teeth were stubborn and refused to fall out early enough and the adult teeth grew out from the gum in front of them.
Can I ask you something? On the link you posted, for the insurance Dentaire Plus, I can see three levels: 0, 1, 2, and 3. If I understand correctly, level 0 is what I’m looking for (orthdontics only, 75% up to 15k CHF/year, maximum until 18 years and then you are moved to level 1, 2, or 3). But I cannot manage to select that when I request a quote, only 1/2/3. Is it the one you have?
Thanks!
EDIT: this is for @BelgianMum , for some reasons I don’t manage to reply to a single post.
We had the equivalent of level 0, just orthodontics for kids.
I can’t remember if that’s what it was called at the time, they keep changing how they call things. I seem to recall it was a separate orthodontic cover back then and wasn’t a part of the dentaire plus thing.
I think @Buzzer may have more recent info about it:
Yes, apparently that’s how it works, this is why I was asking if anyone knew of an insurance with fixed premiums. Also for Dentaire Plus, I cannot find a table with the premium costs increase by age.