The Tricare Dental Program will have a new contractor next Tuesday for the first time in 15 years. Tricare gave a $3.1 billion dental contract to Metropolitan Life Insurance Company last year after Tricare broke ties with its previous carrier United Concordia. Metlife will hold the contract for the next five years. The change in carriers will affect more than 2 million military family members, reserve members and survivors. If you are an active duty in the military or retiree, your dental coverage will remain unaffected.
Most current program en-rollers don’t have to file any paperwork or take any action during the transition. Only those enrollees who use automatic payments from their checking account or credit card to pay their monthly premiums need to reauthorize their payments to MetLife. Tricare’s dental program will now have access to MetLife’s network of more than 164,000 dentist locations. The dental program will have an annual benefit maximum of $1,300 and a lifetime orthodontic maximum of $1,750. For some perspective on this change, when originally covered by United Concordia, the annual benefit maximum was $1,300 and the lifetime maximum for orthodontics was $1,500. Finally Metlife will expand coverage to additional cleaning for pregnant women and survivor benefits for eligible family members.