in the spirit of not wasting money so that you can use the money saved for preps...
Make sure you check your health/dental insurance company's Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) and compare it to the bill you get from your provider. I discovered that our dentist was making us pay the difference between what they charged and what the insurance was paying, and not taking into account what the "allowed" amount that the insurance company sets for the provider to charge for a given service.
For example, the provider charges $1,200 for a crown. The insurance company allows $800, and pays $600 of it. You should only pay $200. The dentist office was trying to get us to pay the difference of $600 between the $1,200 they wanted to charge and the $600 paid by the insurance.
So, saved $400 by not being stupid and paying something I did not owe.
All I had to do was call the office and bring it to their attention. They did some major backpedaling and suddenly instead of owing them $1,600 they owed me over $800 that I had overpaid. They were very happy to comply, because if I had filed a complaint against them through the insurance company, they would have been in a very different world of hurt.
I imagine they are stiffing all their customers that way, and it is probably a common practice overall, so consumer beware...
