Like most of the country, I suspect, I have no real idea how the Dental Service works. The Medical Service can be easily understood by just about everyone but it seems to me that the dental services are a rip-off charter, each practice operating a scale of charges which is exclusive to it and bearing no similarity to any rival practice.
I used to attend a dental surgery in London, an exclusive part of London, I might add and I considered that sometimes, their fees seemed a little over the top. The Rhiwbina Dental surgery is something else. It is the case that they did not coin the phrase ‘extortion’ but they have honed it to a fine art. It is true that their competence is not in doubt but their scale of charges qualify them as the rip-off merchants’ rip-off merchant. It so happens that I suffered an unfortunate experience when I was much younger when my front teeth were removed without the aid of anaesthetic, to wit a stray boot, which means I wear a partial denture. This will soon be replacing and I was advised that a new partial upper denture would cost a shade over £1,900. Out of interest I enquired of two dental laboratories in the area and found that both estimated a replacement would cost, in my case, roughly £600. Have you ever wondered why dental laboratories are in insalubrious premise down some back alley, somewhere? Before settling on this practice I would advise anyone to check out, for comparison, the charges operated by other practices in the area or, indeed, beyond. I calculated that, if I had travelled to London to see my usual dentist, a very good and vastly experienced dentist, by the way, who learned his trade at University College, I should still have been ahead of the deal