Employers are always looking for affordable dental insurance. It's perhaps the most popular coverage with employees (health is more important, but it's expected... dental hasn't achieved that elevated status yet).

Generally you have more control over the plan provisions in a dental plan than you do in a health plan. For example, in your health plan, a doctor's visit is a doctor's visit. It's hard for smaller group to request, say, one copayment for a primary care doctor and a higher copayment for a specialist.

On the other hand, that kind of trade-off is readily available with dental plans. Little things like space maintainers for kids can fall anywhere from the highest-paid category of treatment to the lowest. The choice is largely yours.

Affordable dental insurance isn't all about just reducing the cost, though. You want to be sure that your plan isn't so rich it's unaffordable, but at the same time it shouldn't be so cheesy that it turns off your employees or becomes some kind of joke.

The secret to achieving that kind of inexpensive dental plan is to understand the provisions, the standards that carriers use to pay claims, and how most employees actually use the dental plan. "Deep discount dental" isn't the sole goal -- a cheap dental plan isn't generally a good dental plan.

This section offers many in-depth explanations of how you, the employer, can choose the benefit levels that will help you achieve the goal of having an affordable dental plan while still satisfying your employees. Subjects include:

• Basics of Dental Plan Design -- What's Included and How Much Is Paid? To get more details about how to design affordable dental insurance, click here
• Strategies of Dental Plan Offerings
• Can You "Do It Yourself?" A Strategy for Eliminating the Carrier
• Advanced Strategies to Get the Most for Your Money
• Which Carriers Should You Consider?