smileeasy
Magazine
Research on how dental care is priced, regulated and checked across Switzerland and the six countries we work in. Every figure is sourced, and every article says where the evidence stops.
Treatments
The new smile playbook
Nobody hides veneers anymore. The one thing still left out of the story is what was irreversibly done to the natural teeth.
12 minutes
Markets
How the seven dental markets are structured, and what that does and does not explain about price.
How many dentists a country has, and what that does not explain
Switzerland has roughly the same number of dentists per head as Italy. Hungary has fewer than either, and is the cheapest country on this list. Counting dentists tells you how hard clinics have to compete for a patient. It does not tell you what a crown costs.
9 minutesWhere the saving comes from
A dental bill is mostly somebody's hour. Once you separate the hours from the things, the price gap stops being mysterious and starts being arithmetic.
10 minutesQuality control
What gets inspected, by whom, and whether the check happens before your appointment or only after something has gone wrong.
What's in the box
A dental implant is a manufactured object with a serial number, a factory and a paper trail. Follow that trail across the seven countries a Swiss patient is choosing between, and the differences turn up somewhere other than where most people look for them.
12 minutesEurope regulates the implant and the dentist. Nobody regulates the decision.
What actually gets checked in Switzerland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany and Greece, who does the checking, and whether the check happens before your appointment or only after something has gone wrong.
8 minutesDue diligence
What a patient can verify before booking, which registers hold the answer, and where the record simply does not exist.
Household economics
What dental care costs a Swiss household over a lifetime, and which decisions actually move the number.
Should teeth be in the financial plan?
A Swiss family of four will spend somewhere around CHF 130’000 on dental care over forty years. Basic insurance covers almost none of it. Almost none of it is planned. We built the model to find out which decisions actually move the number, and which ones only feel like they do.
14 minutesThe most expensive body part in Switzerland
A life in Swiss teeth, from the first one at six months to the last one at ninety-nine.
9 minutesEssays
Comment on how Switzerland decided to pay for teeth, and what follows from that decision. Written in the first person and signed.
Excellent teeth, expensive smiles
Switzerland has some of the healthiest teeth in Europe. It also has one of the clearest income gradients in how they look. That is not a gap in the system. It is the system.
10 minutesThe mouth you were given
A young person's teeth in Switzerland are set by two things: what the family could afford, and what it believed about teeth. The first is well documented. The second is where the decision actually gets made, and the state has arranged never to look at it.
14 minutesTreatments
What each procedure involves, what is removed, and what the alternatives are.
Everything here is sourced, and each article names the month its figures were checked. Rules, tariffs and registers change. Nothing in the magazine is medical advice. Which treatment is right for you is a question for a dentist who has examined you.