Who pays us, and who does not

Pocket Molar earns money in one way. Three companies that sell dental discount plans pay a commission if a reader buys a membership after arriving from a link here. That is the whole arrangement.

The three are DentalPlans.com, Careington and DentalSave. Every link to them runs through an address of the form /go/ followed by the company's key, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", and is labelled as paid in the page itself — both at the top of any page that has one and again beside the link. No tracking address ever appears in the text of a page.

The thing to know about what they sell

A dental discount plan is not insurance. It is a yearly membership that buys you a dentist's agreed fee list. Nothing is underwritten, no claim is filed, no annual maximum applies, and no money is reimbursed to you — the full reduced fee still leaves your hands at the desk.

It pays for itself only if the treatment you actually need is on the fee list, a dentist you can actually get to has signed that particular network, and the saving beats the membership fee. If any one of those three fails, the fee bought nothing. The United States consumer regulator's own guidance warns that savings in this category are often a great deal smaller than the marketing suggests.

This site prints no commission rate and no savings percentage for any of the three. No such figure has been read off a network's own dashboard, and a rate copied from a directory is not a fact about anything.

What was turned down, and why

Every lender, without exception

No medical credit card, no pay-later product, no instalment lender, no "no credit check" financier. Several of them run affiliate programmes and none is linked here.

The reason is the readership. This site is read by people working out whether they can afford a filling. Taking a fee for handing one of them a credit agreement — especially one running on deferred interest, where the promotional window ends and the interest reaches back to the day of the purchase — would put every true sentence written about that product under suspicion along with the rest. The site writes about those products in detail and earns nothing from any of them.

Appointment booking and referral

Booking programmes pay when a reader turns up in a chair. A great deal of the advice here is to try a community health centre, a dental school clinic or the practice's own written plan first. Being paid per appointment would argue quietly against all of it, on every page, forever.

Every practice, chain, group and clinic

None is named, ranked, recommended or linked anywhere on this site, paid or otherwise. A site with no clinician on it has no business steering anybody towards a particular chair.

What pays nothing, and is recommended anyway

Federally funded health centres, dental school clinics, state Medicaid programmes, asking a practice for its own written payment plan, and requiring a good faith estimate before agreeing to anything. All of them appear on this site, several of them above the paid links on the same page, and none of them sends a penny in this direction.

Changing any of this

The refusals above are published so that reversing one has to happen in public. If a lender is ever linked from this site, this page will say so first, in plain words, with the date — and the reason will have to be better than the size of the cheque. Until this page changes, the list stands as written.

How to check any of it

Every paid link on the site is an anchor whose address begins with the site's own redirect path, not the vendor's. Right-click one and look. If a link on this site ever points straight at a company without passing through that path and without being labelled, tell the desk — that would be a defect.