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The Link Between Fair Pay and Team Prosperity

When insurance companies dictate fees and force write-offs, the first people to feel it aren’t the executives in corporate headquarters, it’s the dental teams.

When practices lose thousands every month due to unfair reimbursements, that’s money that can’t go toward staff raises, bonuses, continuing education, technology, or cotton rolls.

But when we passed laws that protect fair pay, from ending forced write-offs to banning bundling, that money stays where it belongs. Practices can finally reinvest in their people.

We’ve seen offices increase wages, offer benefits, and even shorten workweeks because they’re no longer working twice as hard just to break even. That’s a win for everyone.

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When we started this 10-week series, our goal was simple, to help dentists bill for what they do and get paid fairly for what they do.

And the reason that’s so important goes beyond money. It’s about honesty. It’s about transparency. It’s about patient trust.

Every law we’ve discussed, from bundling protections to timely filing, was built around one central belief: that patients deserve to know what their care costs, and providers deserve to be paid fairly for delivering it.

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Before this law, we started noticing something troubling — insurance companies were trying to shorten the timely filing period to just three months.

Three months might sound fine on paper, but anyone who’s ever worked the front desk knows that’s barely enough time to process complex claims, wait on coordination of benefits, or deal with slow insurance responses. As a dentist and owner, you need to better understand what your front office team members deal with each day.

Sometimes patients take a few weeks to give updated insurance information, or you’re waiting on primary insurance to pay before submitting to secondary. In many cases, that process can easily stretch past three months.

So that shorter window wasn’t just inconvenient — it was setting offices up to lose legitimate reimbursements.

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If you’ve ever done the right thing for your patient and then been told you have to write it off — this episode is for you.

In 2025, Utah passed one of the most important laws in modern dentistry — part of HB 495 — that made it illegal for insurance companies to force write-offs for services that were already rendered.

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“HB 495: Dispensing Practitioner Status — Restoring Common Sense to Dentistry”

It took months of discussions, revisions, and clarifications, but in 2025, Utah passed HB 495, officially adding dentists to the list of approved dispensing practitioners.

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The sky is falling according to some of the numbers reported by the ADA and Health Institute. The numbers they report are somewhat misconstrued and don't add up. Having said that, Tracy and I give a narrative on the numbers, and are happy to report that 2026 is looking great for dentistry.

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Have you ever opened your insurance payment report and realized that money was taken from one patient’s payment — to repay an ‘overpayment’ on someone completely different?

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Insurance companies have been playing this shell game for years, taking money from one patient’s account to pay back another, sometimes without any warning.

That’s exactly why Utah passed House Bill 495 — the Overpayment & Recoupment Protections Law. And it’s one of the most important reforms for every dental office to understand.

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I want to start today by talking about something that almost every dentist and practice owner I know has experienced at some point in their career.

Frustration.

Frustration with insurance companies.
Frustration with contracts.
Frustration with reimbursement.
Frustration with feeling unheard.

And when that frustration boils over, most dentists are told one of two things:

“You signed a contract.”
Or… “Just drop insurance.”

I’ve heard that response from state associations.
I’ve heard it from leaders in the dental industry.
I’ve heard it from colleagues.

And I struggle with it — not because it’s always wrong, but because it has become the default answer, and default answers don’t solve systemic problems.

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