dental insurance

There is a thing they do with dental insurance, where dentists charge less for people with insurance than for people without insurance. It feels like a shell game when you're trying to decide if the dental insurance is worth it, because you look at the price of a root canal as $800 and think the insurance will cover 80% of it. And you try to compare that with the total cost of your premiums and the risk that you will need a root canal and have to pay $800 for it. Only that's really not how it works...because if an uninsured person needs a root canal, that same dentist charges $2000 for it. (This is yet another way it's expensive to be poor.) Do any of you know what the name of this kind of special fee structure is? I want to ask about it, and it helps to have a name.

My company used to have a version of Delta Dental that did not have the special fee structure. There are a bunch of "participating dentists" that are happy to facilitate the paperwork for people in my plan, and they have lower rates for people in *other* kinds of Delta Dental Plans...but if I need a root canal, it costs $2000. (And the plan will pay back 80% of $800.)

I don't currently need a root canal or any other major dental work. I have the opportunity to enroll in another dental insurance plan, if I propitiate all the administrative nonsense before July 1. If it would involve lower fees for services, like most dental plans do, it would be worthwhile. If it would work like the old Delta Dental my company had, not so much. I don't know how to ask about it, as most people (including everybody I talk to at Delta Dental) seem unable to grasp the concept of "dental insurance" that does not involve a special lower fee structure.