Dr. Tanner Townsend and Dr. Josh Muir discuss Rubicare 💳, a dental and healthcare savings program 💰 that offers discounts on dental 🦷, audiology 👂, optometry 👓, and chiropractic services 💆‍♂️ without a maximum savings cap 🏷️. Unlike traditional insurance, Rubicare provides significant discounts, including 50% off some services 🔖 and 10% off implants 🦷🔩. The annual fee is $79 💵, making it accessible for uninsured individuals and small business owners 👔. Rubicare is legal in Montana 🏞️ and has gained popularity 📈. Financing options like CareCredit, Proceed Finance, and local bank loans 💳🏦 are also available for patients needing financial assistance 🤝. The goal is to help patients access necessary treatments 🦷👩‍⚕️.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 00:01
Welcome back to the Smile Reconstruction podcast. I am here again with Doctor Muir, and today we’re going to be talking a little bit about Rubicare and how it’s really enabled us to help patients get affordable dentures and implants and make it much more affordable for everyone around. So Dr. Muir, tell us a little bit about Rubicare. What’s the history behind Rubicare, and how did it come about?

Dr. Josh Muir 00:25
Yeah, so I am very pleased to be able to announce that we are accepting Rubicare In our office, and this is something that we’ve been working towards for quite a while. But Rubicare is a dental and healthcare savings program or discount program. So Rubicare is a healthcare discount or savings program. It’s not insurance, but in a lot of ways, it’s better than insurance. So Rubicare gives savings in dental, in audiology, in optometry and also in chiropractics. And unlike regular insurance or regular dental insurance, which has a maximum, like the maximum you can save on most plans is about $1,000. Well, some of these cases, as you know, they can be $10,000 or 20 or 30 or $40,000 depending on what is going on and how much is being done. But there’s no maximum, and so if there’s a, for example, a percentage off that can be applied to the entire treatment plan, so there are significant savings there. But really, this story with Rubicare goes back many years, and it has to do with how our insurance programs have lobbied and made laws to protect themselves if a benefit is being offered or a discount is being offered to someone with insurance, anyone that doesn’t have insurance can’t be offered that same discount, and so they end up paying quite a bit more than someone that has insurance. And so it’s hard because the people that don’t have insurance are either business owners or small business owners, or employees, or people that are potentially out of work. And so there’s just a lot of these people that fall through the cracks. And so sometimes it’s the people that need care the most that have the hardest time getting it. And so what Rubicare does, it’s a legal way. Rubicare provides a legal way for patients without insurance to get discounted care as if they had insurance. And they do this by providing the benefit with an annual fee that I believe, about $79 a year. Wow, and that one fee will get them the discount in again, dental, audiology, chiropractics and optometry and so, pretty awesome. And again, there’s no cap on the savings that you can have with that. So there are some offices that offer similar plans, but an in office plan, if it’s not registered with a state, it’s actually illegal to do that if you if you are contracted with insurances, and so Rubicare is one of the first plans in Montana to register with the state to be able to legally provide those discounts. And that’s why it’s become so popular. You know, thousands of patients signing up for them.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 03:16
That’s amazing. So if I understand you correctly, there’s an annual fee of about $79, so for dental what does that all include? Typically, and it almost sounds like it’s better, like you said, than dental insurance in a lot of cases. Who is a good candidate to look into signing up for Rubicare?

Dr. Josh Muir 03:35
Well, Rubicare works for patients that don’t have insurance.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 03:39
Okay

Dr. Josh Muir 03:39
So if any patient that doesn’t have insurance will benefit from Rubicare. I know on the dental side, I understand that a little bit more than I do the chiropractics and the other ones, of course, but on the dental side, even if you just get your cleanings, exams, x-rays a couple times a year, that’s going to more than pay for itself in the savings that you’ll get. And then, of course, if you need any treatment after that, there will be discounts on top of that. And so who’s a candidate? Pretty much anyone without insurance.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 04:08
Wow, that’s great. Now, do you think that a lot of small business owners either are paying through the nose for health insurance or dental insurance for their employees? Do you think it makes sense for some of these smaller businesses to kind of switch over to Rubicare because of all the extra benefits and dental, vision, chiropractic, all those things.

Dr. Josh Muir 04:28
So, you know, I attended a just a little informational seminar about Rubicare that showed some of those things that you’re discussing. So for small and large business owners, you know, they’ll pay a significant amount of money for employee benefits, but this is a really easy one to provide. And the nice thing is, there’s a nice thing about it. So that’s the nice thing. Great, good. Kind of derailed there a little bit, but I was going to say something about the. Kind of the nice thing is that, well, Rubicare will work with business owners for group rates as well, and so there are some additional savings there for employers or organizations that are going to provide that as a as an employee benefit.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 05:16
So that it’s, it sounds like it’s an awesome opportunity, not only for the individual that doesn’t have dental insurance or has limited funds available for for that kind of thing, but also just for the business owners that are trying to stay competitive in this ever increasingly competitive market, which is awesome. So in terms of what would you and I do on a daily basis in terms of dentures and implants? How does Rubicare affect that person that is going to get that 10, 20, 30, $40,000, treatment plan? How is it going to benefit them?

Dr. Josh Muir 05:47
So you ask, what are the benefits of Rubicare in dentistry? Well, some services are 50% off. Other services are less than that. Some are 25% off. And in the implant world, which we deal with the implants themselves are 10% off, and then there are different parts and pieces that have their rates as well. So the neat thing, though, is there’s no cap on that. It’s not 20% off for the first $1,000 it’s, again, whether it’s $1000 or $5000 you still have that same discount all the way through your treatment.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 06:20
Wow, that’s really cool, especially on those bigger cases that we do where we’re doing anywhere between like 812 implants. That’s 10% off of 12 implants. That’s a adds up quickly, yeah, to help help a patient out, which I think is really remarkable, like you said, though, because the dental insurance may only cover up to $2,000 worth of the treatment, and then it’s all on your own after that.

Dr. Josh Muir 06:41
Yeah, and I’ll share a story with you why Rubicare is such a cool thing. So years ago, there’s a procedure called a lateral sinus graft, and it’s one that, you know we do on a routine basis. I know we were just talking about that on our way here, but I charged $1,000 for that procedure. Well, time goes by, and I finally realized with certain insurances, the maximum that they would allow us to receive for that procedure was $600 well, $600 we can’t do the procedure for that. And so we went back to the insurance and we said, hey guys, we need $1,000 for this. And they said, Well, we have negotiated rates basically, so they can show these employers that provide benefits, they can say, hey, we discount. Like, you get this big discount for your dental services. And we said, well, we need $1,000 at least for this, just to bring you right. So what do we need to charge? What does our fee need to be so that we can receive $1,000 like, how do we work in that discount that you guys are are saying is necessary. The fee they came up with was $2,600

Dr. Tanner Townsend 07:47
Whoa!

Dr. Josh Muir 07:48
So they can show that basically they have this huge discount for everyone that signs up for their insurance. And that sounds great, but what about the guys that don’t have insurance? That’s where it becomes an issue, because if we have to raise the fee just because we’re contracted with an insurance company, and then all of these other people have to pay more than twice as much, that’s that’s pretty difficult, especially when it’s nearly triple the price that we needed to get. And so that’s where Rubicare really comes in. And so as I heard about this, heard about the idea, I was like, okay, this makes sense, if the laws are set up that we can’t give these guys the same discount, even though it’s an inflated price for the insurance companies, and we need to come up with something that’s legal, that we can help these other patients out. And so, you know, I don’t want to think of insurance as a game, but it’s absolutely a game. It’s a game to somebody, and we’re all players in it, whether we like it or not. So that’s anything about Rubicare Is it just helps even the playing field. That’s awesome. The way the insurance laws and contracts work is what we charge one patient we have to charge the other patients. So it doesn’t matter if someone’s paying, paying with insurance or without insurance. The only discounts we can really do, we can do like a pay in full discount, basically, other than that, everybody, everybody pays the same thing. So and if we do a pay in full discount, we would share that savings with the insurance company too. We can’t take it off after the fact. So what we do for one patient we have to do for another, and that’s the legal side of it. So Dr Townsend, I have some questions for you.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 09:29
Yeah

Dr. Josh Muir 09:29
You know, the Rubicare side is part of the story, but there’s still, there’s still coming up with the money for these big treatment cases. So what services do we offer and financing options do we offer that a lot of patients are using? Can you explain some of that?

Dr. Tanner Townsend 09:44
Yeah, so we use a variety of different third party financing groups, one of them being cherry. Cherry approves you up to a certain limit, and they’ll approve you to get implant treatment or dentures or fillings or crowns, whatever the case may be. And they’re typically have lower amounts that they typically approve now proceed finance is one that probably a majority of our patients use in the financing realm, just because they’ll approve larger dollar amounts for those larger procedures, and that is more of a healthcare, dental specific financing group, but I will say that the patients that have gone and gotten financing that have gotten the best rates are when they go to their local bank, the patient goes to their local bank and they say, Hey, can I get a loan for this amount? And sometimes I’ll have to leverage that loan or do collateral like against a car or a house or something like that. But oftentimes that will get the patient the best rate possible. So there’s typically three different routes that I see our patients kind of going. It’s either cherry proceed, or going to your local bank and getting a finance loan that way. Any other things that you’ve seen with your patients?

Dr. Josh Muir 10:54
Uh, you know, Care Credit sometimes,

Dr. Tanner Townsend 10:56
Sure That’s great. Well, anything else that you would like to touch on Dr Muir in terms of Rubicare and how patients can really come up with the finances to support themselves for their treatment?

Dr. Josh Muir 10:56
That’s that’s one that some patients have, the rates are a little higher on that. And so I like the other options, but it’s, it is a helpful option. I have a patient that we just worked on today that care credit made the most sense for them. So sometimes I get asked the question, why, why can’t I just make payments to you guys? And you know, like I said, we do offer a pay in full discount. “Well, why?”. Oh my goodness, if we have to track all of the payments and send out statements every month for who knows how long, like that is a lot of work for someone or multiple people to do. So if we can avoid that, yeah, we’ll pass that savings on to the patient. I mean, we’re essentially eliminating the need for many, many hours every week doing that. So that’s the other thing, paying full discount, whether there’s some financing applied or not. You know, the the take home message is, we actually do want to help patients get their treatment. You know, we want patients to live their best life, and so we accept insurance, we accept Rubicare, we accept different financing options, and we’ll help patients find those options. And again, the bottom line is, we want to help patients get the treatment that they need, and we’ll do whatever we can to accommodate that.

Dr. Tanner Townsend 12:22
I love that. I think that really just shows our efforts or to help people get the health that, health care that they need and the treatment they need, and whether it’s like you said, it’s through insurance or financing, we’ll do our best to make it happen. All right, that is it for today’s episode of Smile Reconstruction.