Insurance isnt just the issue...

I agree we have a problem with people getting health care in this country and ive looked over programs in other countries, ive researched the national health care solutions thats been offered up by our candidates and still i dont see one of many problems with health care being fixed.

Health care costs...   I know this really doesnt seem to have anything to do with health care but id like to share with you something that my own family is facing now.  Its about dental insurance,  now you might think this doesn't have anything to do with health care but it does because the exact same thing is happening in the health care industry.

The problem...    I recently took my daughter to the dentist,  the office for some reason had my insurance company wrong so when they sent me my daughters treatment plan with the dentists price, what my insurance would pay and what was going to come out of my families pocket the information was based on a different insurance. The price of the dentist was around $1600. I called the dentist and corrected the mistake expecting to get another treatment plan with the same dentist fees but with what the insurance would pay and my out of pocket costs adjusted to fit my actual insurance.

What i received was a new treatment plan the dentist fees had went up to $2,300.  I called the dentist office and asked them why their price had went up just based on a change of insurance when the wrong insurance company and my insurance company paid out the exact same amount in benefits., after a few minutes of the woman stumbling around trying to explain the inflated price, she finally landed on some junk about the fee being changed based on the area i lived in. I then tried to get her to explain why the fee had changed when i hadnt changed areas.  She then tried to say the insurance company decided the price.  Now anyone in the US with insurance knows that with most insurance companies they have a maximum amount the insurance will pay on each service but they do not decide what fees the actual provider charges.  My out of pocket expenses went from 800 to 1500 just over the change of insurance and it wasnt that my insurance paid less but that the dentist charged more for each service. I had a friend call the same dentist and tell them they had no insurance and ask how much it would cost for the same services,  i was amazed but not amazed when they were told the total fees from the dentist was less then $1000.  It seems im better off not having dental insurance, the same can be said about health insurance because many health care providers do the exact same thing as the dentist office.

How will a national health care plan address that problem? A provider can still do the same thing leaving me with a higher out of pocket expense then i had in the first place.   In countries with national health care plans, how do they deal with issues like that?