Dental insurance is useless, is Meituan’s “Rest assured” a white knight?
Text/Liu Huafang “Xiao Fang Xia” · Produced
The teeth of young people represent confidence and smiles, the teeth of middle-aged and elderly people represent health and peace of mind. Oral health is the cornerstone of modern people’s quality of life, and dental implants are one of the greatest inventions of mankind.
In the past few years, I have spent 70,000 to 80,000 yuan on oral health care such as dental implants, orthodontics, tooth fillings, and root canal treatments. The cost is not low, but I feel it is worth it because I smile more after orthodontics and eat more deliciously after dental implants.
When the elders in my family lost their teeth, I firmly supported them in getting dental implants. Solid artificial teeth are much better than loose dentures and years of toothache when chewing. The only two concerns of family members were: the reliability of dental implants and the cost of dental implants.
Dental implants are not new, but a mature oral technology. The government is also promoting the cost reduction and industry standardization of dental implants. However, the frequent occurrence of dental implants such as “opaque prices” and “no after-sales guarantee” has made consumers’ dental implant journey “thrilling step by step”, becoming an invisible obstacle to the popularization of dental implants.
Current status of dental implants:
The rate of dental visits is extremely low, and dental insurance is useless
China is a country with a population of 1.4 billion. The absolute number of oral diseases is certainly not small. So, what is the prevalence rate? The data may shock you. The prevalence rate of oral diseases in my country is as high as 97%, but the rate of seeking medical treatment is less than 10%. The current status of oral health of Chinese people is very poor, comparable to that of the Chinese men’s football team. It is worrying and urgently needs to be systematically changed.
Compared with Europe, the United States and Japan, China’s oral medical industry has problems such as a low number of dental clinics in China (only 6,000), extremely low consultation rate, extremely low implant penetration rate, extremely low dental insurance penetration rate, and immature industry regulations. There is still a long way to go, and the potential market size is huge, which requires the efforts of all parties to break through the ecological bottleneck.
Dental implants are the “golden solution” for restoring missing teeth, but there are problems such as high technical barriers, opaque prices, and no after-sales guarantee, which discourage many consumers and affect the process of popularizing dental implant technology to the general public.
The fourth national oral health epidemiological survey showed that high prices, limited medical insurance reimbursement, and low trust in institutions are the three main reasons that hinder patients from seeking medical treatment. In fact, after the implementation of the national centralized procurement policy in 2023, the price of a single implant has dropped by more than 30%, and domestic implants have risen rapidly, and the price is already relatively much cheaper.
However, consumers’ main concerns are “who is responsible if dental implant fails?”, “how to protect rights if the institution runs away?”, “medical insurance will not reimburse”… However, the institutions and insurance companies on the market are isolated islands in the value chain and are unable to solve this trust pain point at all.
At present, my country’s medical insurance mainly covers basic dental treatments such as tooth extraction and periodontal disease. Porcelain teeth, dental implants, and teeth cleaning are basically not covered by medical insurance. There are more and more commercial dental insurances, which are divided into multiple categories. However, most insurance companies have limited coverage and are unable to cover high-risk and high-cost treatments. Consumers often have to wait for 7 days, 3 months, or even longer, which cannot meet users’ demand for immediate use.
Demand is booming, the country is pushing hard,
Quality and safety come first
China’s population is 4.2 times that of the United States, but its implant penetration rate is only 7% of that of the United States, and its per capita annual oral medical expenditure is less than 0.03% of that of the United States. Relatively speaking, China’s oral medical ecosystem is in its very early stages and requires all-round efforts in public health concepts, dental medical penetration, etc. to move forward.
The potential scale of China’s oral health market is very large, and demand is growing rapidly. The market size is expected to reach 62.5 billion yuan in 2024, with an annual growth rate of 13%. At present, the most urgent need is to break the information asymmetry and trust gap caused by the demand blowout and low implant penetration rate. It requires joint efforts and innovation in many aspects such as implant safety and reliability and the professionalism of dental institutions .
On March 21, the General Office of the National Health Commission issued the “Notice on the National Medical Quality and Safety Improvement Goals in 2025”, aiming to further strengthen medical quality and safety management and continuously improve the level of medical quality and safety. The “2025 Quality Control Improvement Goals for Each Specialty” pointed out that oral implant technology has received widespread attention from the people, and the rate of implant shedding before restoration is an important indicator reflecting the success or failure of oral implant technology.
The implant shedding rate is high before restoration, with the early shedding rate ranging from 10% to 30%. This is not simply a technical problem, but is related to factors such as the patient’s bone condition (such as osteoporosis), postoperative infection (such as peri-implantitis), and surgical trauma.
If the implant falls off before restoration, it will not only lead to treatment failure, but may also cause complications such as redness, swelling, and pain, requiring a secondary surgery to repair it, further increasing the burden on the patient.
Therefore, not every dentist can perform dental implant surgery. It requires extremely high technical skills and requires accurate assessment of bone volume, implant angle, and postoperative management. Public data shows that there are only about 15,000 professional implant doctors in China, and some institutions are not qualified or operate in a standardized manner, which directly leads to an increase in the failure rate of surgery.
The author recalls his own dental implant experience. At that time, he went to a well-known dental clinic in Beijing Asian Games Village. Most of the doctors in the clinic graduated from well-known medical universities. The doctor who performed the dental implants on me was an experienced doctor, and another doctor only started to perform dental implants himself after observing and learning for more than a year.
Quality and safety always come first. The unrivaled manufacturing capabilities of China can significantly reduce the cost per dental implant. Next, specialization and standardization are needed in the market and industry to resolve consumers’ concerns about dental implants .
Meituan first launched the “Rest assured planting”
The “service + insurance” model that covers risks throughout the entire cycle
In March 2025, in the field of oral dental implants, Meituan Medical Health launched the “Rest Assured Dental Implants” program in 305 cities across the country. It was customized and launched by Meituan Merchant Insurance and Insurance Company, and was the industry’s first new “service + insurance” model of contract performance transaction protection.
Meituan’s “Rest assured implant” has joined hands with leading dental merchants to jointly launch a single dental implant package. To address the user pain point of implant falling off before restoration, it has made four major commitments: “Free re-implantation if implant fails; full refund if re-implant is not possible; rest assured referral if store closure occurs” + “Compare prices across the entire network” . The rights and interests protection covers Korean and European implant products, mainly including brands such as Osteodent, Dental, Nobel Biocare, and Straumann. Users can enjoy the platform’s free insurance when placing an order.
As a local life platform, Meituan is the entrance to local consumption for the general public. The launch of “Rest assured” can solve users’ worries at the source and better promote the healthy growth of the oral health consumer market. In addition, online initiatives to unify service standards can also enable more excellent dental institutions to obtain more customers, thus forming an ecological cycle.
Meituan’s “Rest assured” program has joined hands with leading dental institutions to control medical quality from the source, ensuring that the diagnosis and treatment environment, equipment and doctor qualifications meet the requirements. The Meituan platform is equipped with an exclusive customer service team to provide full-process tracking services to ensure the quality of diagnosis and treatment and service experience. It is reported that brands such as BYBO, Dingzhi, Happy Dental, Huaerkang, Meao, Weller Dental, and Doctor of Tooth have already settled in.
“Rest assured vaccination” provides protection and ecological breakthroughs in the three dimensions of technical guarantee, financial guarantee, and service guarantee. Through the power of the platform, it has solved many deadlocks in consumer scenarios and brought some breakthrough solutions. For example, if the original medical institution is unable to continue to provide services for some reason, the platform will arrange a referral; if the revaccination cannot be completed, a full refund can be obtained, which fully guarantees the diagnosis and treatment cycle and risk scenarios to ensure that users are properly arranged.
Comparing horizontally and vertically, compared with traditional dental insurance on the market, Meituan’s “Rest assured dental implant” has overcome the three major shortcomings of dental insurance – ready-to-use, wide coverage, and transparent process, making dental implant services as convenient as group buying services for food, drink, and entertainment, and providing consumers with ” full-cycle risk coverage ” for dental implant treatment, achieving a “one-time choice, worry-free throughout the process” dental implant experience.
Platform innovation, two-way movement,
Win-win situation for high-quality institutions and consumers
Meituan’s “Rest Assured Planting” dares to carry out “full-cycle risk coverage” and is a bold innovation in ecological digitalization. It reconstructs the trust chain between consumers and institutions through the integration of digital capabilities and ecological resources.
On the consumer side, Meituan’s one-stop solution “Rest assured” has achieved “unified measurement” and true “clear pricing” in the field of dental implants, greatly reducing the decision-making cost of dental implants. The price comparison function breaks through the price fog, strictly selects the qualifications of institutions (assessing medical compliance, dispute resolution and other dimensions), and is matched with insurance to achieve “one choice, worry-free throughout the process”. Meituan has done what traditional dental insurance “dare not think about, cannot do”.
In dental institutions, after the launch of Meituan’s “Rest Assured Seed”, the transaction volume of mass dental institutions in the first batch of cooperative institutions increased by 50% year-on-year, and excellent dental institutions will gain more trust from consumers. The Meituan platform helps high-quality institutions stand out through traffic tilt, exclusive logos and other support, forcing and guiding the dental industry to undergo a butterfly change, shifting from “low-price competition” to “service competition” to high-quality growth.
Yao Xue, chairman of Popular Dental, believes that “rest assured vaccination” is a very good solution to the current trust crisis in the dental industry, and it has dual benefits for consumer rights protection and merchant operations. “Local life platforms such as Meituan, by providing value-added services such as service + insurance, can not only reduce consumer decision-making costs and dispel concerns, but also protect the rights and interests of high-quality dental institutions on the platform, achieving two-way protection.”
From the perspective of the overall ecological situation of national oral health, Meituan’s “Rest assured planting” is a platform innovation, a two-way effort, and a win-win for all three parties . It has played the role of the platform’s ecological leverage and used market and digital forces to increase the penetration rate of oral diagnosis and treatment among Chinese people.
From “treatment” to “prevention”,
The long-term value of oral health ecology
The penetration rate of dental implants in Europe and the United States is high, and Japan is more advanced in oral prevention. These are worth learning from my country. We should not only treat diseases well, but also prevent them. At present, the oral health prevention of the younger generation in my country has started from kindergarten, and the oral health status in the future will definitely improve significantly.
Meituan’s “Rest assured implant” is an innovation that links insurance companies, institutions and users, and currently focuses on the dental implant ecosystem. In the future, this type of service model may cover orthodontics, periodontal treatment and other fields, thereby promoting transparency in all categories of dental services.
The low rate of dental treatment in China is due to historical reasons of the development of the times, especially among the middle-aged and elderly population. Many people’s dental diseases began in their adolescence due to a lack of dental care knowledge and treatment conditions, which is a historical debt.
At present, from “curing diseases” to “prevention”, the oral health of Chinese people requires the joint efforts of the whole society, and requires breakthroughs and innovations in multiple dimensions such as concepts, markets, and medical institutions. This is a major public welfare issue that is always correct and has long-term value .
Conclusion
When dental implants are no longer a product for the nobility and move from being a “luxury product” to “mass consumption”, the entire industry ecosystem needs to break down information asymmetry and trust barriers.
The “service + insurance” protection model gives consumers the confidence to “dare to consume”. Through digital capabilities and ecological collaboration, it provides a new win-win paradigm for the high-quality development of the oral industry. It may be the best example of universal access to oral medical consumption.
meituan is good guy