Retirement: Dental Insurance observation

A brief recap - When I retired, my wife was moved to Corning pre-65 retiree health insurance. There is no dental or vision for her in that plan. I chose to look around to see what I might do. I decided to try MetLife Takealong Dental insurance, and pay out-of-pocket for vision.

I have a small bit of data on my dental insurance choice that I want to pass along. My wife recently went to the dentist and I have the billing info. I've forecasted my insurance premium cost and dental visit cost for the year for both of us. Assume two cleanings and one set of x-rays per year. Here's what I see:

Dentist bills: $936 Insurance paid: $452 We pay (premiums + what ins didn't pay): $1,492

As you can see, this insurance is not a good deal for us. We would be better paying out-of-pocket. I just got off the phone with MetLife. The issue in my case is my dentist is not in-network. This is interesting because while I was employed, I used this dentist for 36 years, and typically paid almost nothing for regular dental care with employee dental coverage (also MetLife for most of that).

I asked the MetLife representative what the in-network numbers looked like. She explained this was difficult because those numbers are negotiated with each dentist. I find it hard to believe they're negotiating with each dentist but who knows. For an in-network dentist, MetLife pays 100% of the negotiated rate for the routine things my wife had done.

I'm probably going to wait to see what my dentist bills me for my wife's visit. If it's what the MetLife summary I received in the mail says, I'll have to decide what to do. I guess the choices are changing dentists or canceling this insurance and paying out of pocket.