Amy Scott

I still wasn't making any money at all.

And I was like, at what point do I say this isn't working?

I need to go find a job where I can make some money.

There's a very, very strong idea that dentists are, you know, they're very, very wealthy, you know, oh, my crown is just paying for your next boat payment.

Right.

And I'm like, you haven't even touched the cost of my rent for this month.

But I was very grateful that I stuck it out so that I can treat my patients the way I feel that they should be treated without a quota from a corporate office or private equity saying I need to push this treatment.

I didn't want that.

I had no idea when I went into dentistry how expensive every aspect of dentistry is.

We are essentially creating a very small surgical suite inside our office.

We have intraoral scanners.

That's $15,000 to $35,000.

We have all of our sterilization stuff.

That's another $15,000, $20,000.

Just the filling materials themselves are each little capsule is $5, $20, $30.

So when you look at what just the physical cost of materials is for something as simple as a filling, and then you throw in all the other overhead with it, you look back and you're like, wow, you're barely making, you know, above minimum wage if that filling takes you more than an hour.

And you end up working on extremely small margins anyway, because in multiple scenarios, the reimbursement we get from insurance has gone down and the cost of everything has gone up in 25, 30 years.

But what we're getting paid has not.

So when they do things like say, we're going to cut your reimbursement, it's not, oh, I can't afford my boat payment.

It's I can't afford to pay my employees.