sued the practices<\/a>, Canarsie Family Dentistry and New York Family Dentistry, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing them of false advertising and deception and seeking restitution and other penalties.<\/p>\n\u201cNo one in pain should be treated like a payday,\u201d the agency\u2019s commissioner, Samuel A.A. Levine, said in a statement. \u201cWhen dental providers exploit New Yorkers who desperately need care, New York City will halt their predatory practices and hold them accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neither practice responded to phone calls or emails seeking comment on the city\u2019s accusations. New York Family Dentistry, which has three locations in the neighborhood (one of which has a sign out front reading \u201cAll Smiles & insurance accepted\u201d), and Canarsie Family Dentistry, which has one location, are not connected, the city said.<\/p>\n
The city said that the practices pushed the credit products on their patients for one reason: \u201cThey get immediate payment in full, right away,\u201d Melissa Iach\u00e1n, the consumer protection department\u2019s deputy general counsel, said. \u201cThere\u2019s no waiting, no negotiating with insurers or accepting partial payment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suit, filed on July 17, details about a half-dozen case histories. Ms. Iach\u00e1n said the city expected to hear from many more patients who had been similarly hoodwinked.<\/p>\n
One patient named in the suit, Carol Romain, was told by the staff of Canarsie Family Dentistry that her insurance would not cover the extraction, crown and antibiotics they said she needed, the suit said. The practice at first refused to try to submit a claim to Ms. Romain\u2019s insurer and would not even provide her the procedure codes for her to submit a claim herself, so she was forced to choose between paying $1,500 out of pocket or tolerating the pain.<\/p>\n
While she was in the dental chair, the staff gave her husband a document to sign that he thought was necessary to submit a claim to insurance. But the couple later learned that it was a credit application and that the credit company had paid Canarsie Family Dentistry $3,000 on the spot that the couple was now liable for.<\/p>\n
Lola Parchment, a retired nurse\u2019s aide, came to Canarsie Family Dentistry in 2023 seeking relief from dental pain and filled out some forms that she understood to be routine intake paperwork, according to the suit. She got a simple cleaning, which she believed her insurer would cover, but when the staff told her she needed thousands of dollars worth of work, she said she could not afford it and left.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll they did was clean my teeth and tried to get me to borrow thousands of dollars I did not want to borrow,\u201d Ms. Parchment said in a phone call on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
In 2025, she got a letter from a collection company telling her she was being sued for $5,291 for charges associated with Canarsie Family Dentistry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was shocked when I got the paper for me to go to court,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re preying on elders and poor people. They\u2019re terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yasmin Breeden, a 67-year-old woman on Medicaid and Medicare, went to Canarsie Family Dentistry for a partial denture installation and was told that all her remaining teeth needed to be extracted and replaced with permanent dentures, Ms. Iach\u00e1n said.<\/p>\n
Rather than billing Medicare or Medicaid, Ms. Iach\u00e1n said, the practice told Ms. Breeden she needed to pay $1,000 out of pocket immediately and take out a loan for another $5,000. The dentist pulled her teeth but failed to install the screws for the dentures properly. When her daughter tried to get the practice to correct the problem, she was told that Ms. Breeden would need to take out another $10,000 loan, Ms. Iach\u00e1n added.<\/p>\n
Within the last few weeks, Ms. Iach\u00e1n said, the practice contacted Ms. Breeden and her daughter again. This time, employees threatened to send her account to collections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The dentists and their assistants often delivered the bad news when the patient was already in the treatment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,18041,100,99,24951,117113,15072,9,24,63,11771,117112],"class_list":["post-309590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-nyc","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-consumer-protection","tag-department-of-consumer-and-worker-protection-nyc","tag-health-insurance-and-managed-care","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-suits-and-litigation-civil","tag-teeth-and-dentistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}