medical/dental savings

I am continuing on my quest to find affordable medical/dental health care. Here are some new things I discovered recently. Remember when we went to the dental school at UCSF? We got a price quote of $800 to pull 3 teeth. I thought that didn't sound too bad. My husband put off doing it until recently. He recently was in such pain it became an emergency. Since it was an emergency we decided to try to figure out how to do it here. First I had him call the local UCSF dental clinic. They told us they have no relationship with the dental school and would not take his xrays that were already done. Seriously! I have to say that just floored me. Then we called the Poverello house which I heard will pull teeth for free. Their services are very limited and they require you to call every day at 1pm to find out if they have a dentist available that day. They didn't the day my husband needed it so that was out. I remembered my friend had her tooth pulled at a clinic down the street from my house for $100. That sounded good to me. We called the Tower dental clinic and they agreed to see my husband and use his own xrays. Sounded good to me. They quoted us $370 for all 3 teeth. Well that was considerably less than the $800 the dental school quoted us. It turned out to be $520 since they ran into a problem pulling the wisdom tooth but still. almost a $300 savings without the expense of the drive. I recently found out that there are two local programs that you can use on a sliding scale for a doctor. Clinica Sierra Vista and United Health Centers. It says on the internet United Health does dental as well. I'm going to check that out asap. There have also been major changes to healthcare coverage so you might try checking out this site.  www.coverageforall.org  I recently was told by my doctor to get some lab tests. I started calling around to see what the charge would be and if I could get a discount for cash. You would not believe the price differences so it really pays to call around. I haven't figured it out yet, other than to determine that community hospital is charging way too much money. They wanted double the amount the independent lab wanted  to do the test and only give a mere 10% for cash. Astounding considering the complaints they have of not getting enough reimbursement from the state from medi-cal or for the indigents from the county. Here they have a cash paying customer and they want to charge me double? All I can say is wow! I have a couple more calls to make and then I will post who was the cheapest.