Dentists

I’m thinking of refusing to pay part of my National Insurance. Before you judge me, it’s not in the same way that old people occasionally refuse to pay their council tax because they’ve not come to terms with the fact rationing has ended and bread costs more than a handful of cocoa beans. My reason is true and just, ironically, quite the opposite of the target of my ire: dentists.

If dentists take on NHS patients, then they get paid by the NHS, which is funded by National Insurance. An easy enough system; you might even go so far as to call it fair. Doctors, kind, caring, ever patient Doctors are paid by National Insurance donations, so we can live safe in the knowledge that next time we suffer from tennis elbow, jogger’s knee or footballer’s penis, we will be treated without judgement and for free. Not a penny. The Doctor will already have been paid.
That’s the case if the Doctor treats your leg, arm, or wherever you injured in that tragic fishing incident. They don’t discriminate.

Dentists, however, are a different breed. Despite only ever studying teeth, they manage to wrangle 7 years of study out of university. There are only 32 teeth, yet dentists study for the same amount of time as a Doctor who has to know every vein, muscle, bone and hair in the whole human body.

My last dentist appointment consisted of an angry looking man wielding a rather sharp object in the vague direction of the chair I was to sit in. He shone what seemed to a football stadium floodlight in my eye before beginning wrenching my jaw open, poking inside my mouth with a small sickle and muttering random letters and number.

“A 3, 47 K, QZ 8,962 and p -0.314.” His assistant wrote all this down, and then he poked a couple of my teeth with his finger, whilst sounding as if my mouth was some sort of construction site. “Hmmmmm, yes, mmmm. Interesting. I’ll just do a little scrape here, and lay some tarmac there.”
The scrape involved pricking my gums with the sickle until they started to bleed profusely. He barked at me, “your teeth are fine get out!” and I was sent on my way with nothing to stop the flood of blood, but a gargling of florescent green fluid that looked suspiciously like engine coolant.

For this quarter of an hour I was charged £15; a pound a minute. All of this despite the fact I was an ‘NHS patient.’ I protested that I’d already paid through national insurance, but then the dentist walked into the office wielding some sort of drill asking ‘is there a problem?’ It was like some sort of Russian nightclub charging me to leave.

The worst part of this is, if you’re only an NHS patient you get the equivalent of Tesco Value toothcare; braces made of corrugated iron and caps from papier-mâché. If you want your teeth fixed so they don’t fall out when you sneeze then you have to go private.

All that’s ignoring dental hygienists. Regular cleaners break their back to make sure entire hospitals are germ free and make £5 an hour. A dental hygienist has their subject sat in a chair at a comfortable height and takes 20 minutes to make £60.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a class. When they leave I’m going to charge £20 each and tell them if they want a grade A they’ll have to go private.