Northern Dental
18-07-2010I was up North this weekend to have a visit with a new dentist. I think I like this new dentist for many reasons, the main one being she didn't find a hundred things wrong with my teeth just to make money. There was no "Oh look, that needs a filling." or "Yep you need to have everything pulled out of your mouth because I need to buy a new car.". Nope, there was none of that.
As any regular reader of The Bauble will know, I got told recently that I need to have my bottom two wisdom teeth taken out. They have started to rot and are causing problems for the nearby teeth. The price that was thrown my way was seven hundred euro, at best. The reality being something in the one thousand five hundred euro region.
This was news that displeased me greatly. But more than that it displeased the lady friend.
Coming from the North she is used to having health care and dentist work being something that a person doesn't have to save up for. Something that your PRSI (or the Northern equivalent) actually contributes towards, thus bringing down the cost to the customer/patient. As such she said "Fuck that, you are going up North to get that done.".
A phonecall later and we have figured it all out. I have to go up for a quick appointment, which will then refer me onto the dentist that will do the actual pulling of the teeth. Simple. What's more, the dentist had no problems at all with this. She knew straight away my reason for going up.
Why though? Why travel an hour to get this work done? Mainly because the cost of it, if I go private, is coming in at just over three hundred euro,or a fifth of the cost here. Hell that is even going as a private patient, not trying to scam any money out of the health service.
We explained this to the dentist on Friday and she near had a heart attack listening to the tale. She said that she can't figure out how dentists in the Republic can justify the cost of these operations. Apparently every month there are more and more people driving up to Newry and Belfast to have dental work done, purely because the little bit of inconvenience is worth the savings. Yet this sledgehammer of knowledge is not knocking any sense into the dentists (or retailers for that matter) of the Republic.
Even that short appointment only cost me twenty five pound, or roughly half the cost of a normal check up here.
I was telling the lady friend afterwards that I found an ad I heard on the radio funny. The ad basically said that the Dentists of Dublin had now started to match the Northern prices. So why go North when you can pay the same price right on your doorstep. The one price that stuck in my mind was the cost of a filling. A filling was being advertised as now costing only fifty euro. Fifty, that is a saving of like forty quid. Bargain, sign me up I say.
Except a filling up North costs fifteen pound. No matter how dyslexic you are, there is no way you can make fifteen pound convert into euros and come up with fifty. It just isn't doable.
The Minister for Finance was on the radio about a month ago, saying that the fact that UK vat had increased from 17.5% to 20% was going to mean people would stop going up North to shop and trade would increase in the Republic again. I laughed when I heard that.
An increase of 2.5% on something that costs half of what it sells for in the Republic is still a massive saving. I am a patriot to the end, but when it comes down to it this country is in shambles. If I can get something up North for less than I can here, you can damn well be sure that's what I will be doing.
It is getting to the stage now that we really should just shut up shop. Everyone, all four million of us, should just leave the country, close it down for ten days, then come back and start up new and fresh. Prices, vat, taxes, PRSI, the whole lot from the ground up. But I suppose so long as TD's only get suspended without pay for twenty days because they swindled eighty-one thousand in cash from the tax payers we are pretty much stuck with the crapfest that we have.
Blue_jester