My experience with a Dental Clinic

The govt has started to scrutinize the claims made by clinics under the CHAS scheme.  Two dental clinics had been suspended and more are under investigations. I had an experience with a dental clinic sometime last year and it gave me mixed feelings.

It was nice to seek dental treatment under the CHAS/Pioneer Generation Scheme and came out without having to pay a single cent. Wow, wasn’t that nice?

It was something else when the dental surgeon hardly did anything to your teeth. I asked for a broken filling to be redone but was told it was still ok. It has been chipped and breaking down in several parts and would only get worse. But that was it. The dental surgeon did think it necessary to do anything. I was not pleased.

The other strange feeling was that I did not received any receipt or statement as to the treatment done and how much it cost, how much was the subsidy and how much the dental clinic would be claiming on my treatment.

This is unacceptable as a dental patient would not know, and need not care how was the billing done and whether that was the treatment done. This big hole must be plugged, with the patient receiving a statement on the treatment he received and the cost of the treatment as a check on the clinic involved.

Hope this violation of a govt subsidy scheme is not abused too widely and public money not wasted unnecessarily. Let’s wait for more audit reports and scrutinizes to know the whole truth.