I had a dental appointment Wednesday for a cleaning. I signed in at the reception desk and waited to be called. After only a couple of minutes, someone came into the waiting room and called my name. I was given a clipboard along with a stack of papers. I was told that I needed to fill out the forms and then bring them back up to the reception desk when I was done.

The clipboard had a bunch of forms, the type of forms you normally fill out when you first go to see a dentist. I was in two months ago getting a crown installed and they didn’t make me fill out forms. I asked why I needed to fill any of these out. I was told that they now require patients to submit these forms every year and I haven’t filled them out in four years.

Huh?

I went back to my seat and began filling the forms out. I was able to fill out most of the questions on the first page without any difficulty. I’m still a male and my birthday hasn’t changed in the last four years. I then got to the part where I had to enter the information concerning my insurance. This was a problem. Since I’ve been married, I’ve always been on my wife’s medical and dental insurance. Her insurance has always been much better than the crappy insurance offered by any of my former employers. When we first started going to this particular dentist four years ago, to the best of my knowledge, we took paperwork concerning our dental insurance with us and gave the paperwork to them.

I couldn’t even remember the name of our dental insurance, let alone the policy number or the group number. There’s no card that I carry in my wallet. I simply go to the dentist and they tell me what I need to pay in the form of a co-payment and they do the rest. Because I’m using my wife’s insurance, they wanted all of her information too, including her Social Security number. There are probably a lot of husbands that know everything about their wife, including their Social Security number. I’m not one of those husbands. Since my wife is also a patient, they already have all of her information. Then again, they already have all of my information too.

I looked through the rest of the forms. They wanted to know not only all of my dental history, they wanted to know my entire medical history too, including any medications I’m taking. I took the time to give them all this information four years ago and to the best of my knowledge, none of it has changed.

I decided that I wasn’t going to fill these forms out again.

My name was called so I went back up to the reception area. I handed the clipboard to the woman that called my name and I told her was done. She looked at the forms and said that I needed to fill out everything completely. I said I wasn’t going to do that. I said that everything was the same as the last time I filled out the forms. She said that I still needed to fill them out completely. My response to this was to tell her that I would be canceling my appointment. Then again, it was 20 minutes past my appointment, but that wasn’t because of me. I got there early. I put the clipboard down and walked out. I’m never going back.

I refuse to jump through their hoops. There was no valid reason for me to fill out forms that I’ve already filled out. They already posses the information they asked me to provide. If I have to fill out lengthy forms detailing not only my entire dental history, but my entire medical history too, I might as well just go to a new dentist. Who knows, maybe I can find a dentist that doesn’t have Fox News playing in every room.