Your Health Insurance Company Explains Why Your Eyes and Teeth Are Not Part of Your Body
We are not obligated to provide coverage for luxury bones.
Dear Policy Holder:
We here at Barely Adequate Health Insurance are often asked, “Why do I have to buy vision and dental insurance as separate policies? My eyes and my teeth are part of my body, right? So why aren’t they covered under normal health insurance?”
Good question (not really, but there’s something called “customer service”, which means we sometimes have to actually respond to your stupid emails).
For one thing, not many people are aware of the ancient war that has been waged over the centuries between medical (or “real”) doctors, dentists, and optometrists. The battle has ranged across continents, where insults were hurled and luxury vacation properties were purchased, each grander and tackier than the last.
Dentists have long been segregated into separate schools to learn their disgusting trade, and optometrists are basically just taught how to turn off the lights and torture people with puffs of air.
Personally, we don’t know why we ever progressed from old-timey barbers pulling teeth with pliers or a long string tied to a doorknob.
It worked, didn’t it?
And the whole “Which is better, one or two?” You realize that you’re basically giving yourself an eye exam, right? There’s very little you couldn’t figure out at home with an eye patch and a flashlight.
If you can’t read the captions on a foreign movie, you need glasses. That will be $700.
If you read your health insurance policy closely (and if you can’t, you should probably have your eyes checked, entirely at your expense) you’ll see that teeth are defined as “luxury bones” which are not necessary for survival, unlike, say, your heart (your “thumpity-thump”) or your brain (your “head walnut”).
Just look at babies, for example, or platypuses. They don’t have any teeth and they seem to do just fine.
The same applies to eyes. You’ve got two of them, right? We can’t be expected to shell out money for surplus orbs. (People born without eyes will be treated on a case-by-case basis.)
We hope this answers your question as to why teeth and eyes aren’t actually parts of your body for purposes of health insurance coverage, and are actually superfluous evolutionary remnants that are holding us back from becoming the cannibalistic underground dwellers that climate change will force us to be.
You are of course free to purchase a separate dental or vision policy that still won’t cover most of the things you need done.
We’d say more, but there’s a roving band of dentists in the hallway looking for trouble and we’re afraid of those sharp pokey things they use that don’t do anything except make you jump like an idiot.
Dentists think it’s hysterical when you do that.
I would pay for vision insurance if it freaking covered anything.
I'd be doubled over laughing if I wasn't needing to make yet another appointment at the local dental college because the crown one of their students put on a year ago is wobbly. What a world, what a world!