dental insurance prompt pay laws

Sourced answer

It depends on the state and — critically — on whether the prompt-pay statute reaches dental at all: the widely-quoted numbers are usually the medical rules. Across 51 jurisdictions read against statute text, 19 expressly cover dental, 6 exclude stand-alone dental outright (the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Vermont), and 13 never name dental at all, leaving the question open. Deadlines run from 15 days to 45; interest ranges from none at all in North Dakota and South Dakota to 3% a month in Mississippi, and several states pay it only through a court judgment or a regulator's order. Every one of the 51 records carries a per-claim ledger behind it — the exact quote, the statutory pinpoint, and the URL the verifier actually opened for each deadline, rate, and applicability verdict. A self-funded private-employer (ERISA) plan is generally beyond the reach of any of these statutes and runs on the federal claims-procedure clock instead — but that comes from the courts reading 29 U.S.C. § 1144, not from its text, and it is not categorical: a self-funded governmental or church plan is not an ERISA plan at all, § 1144(b)(6) leaves multiple employer welfare arrangements open to state insurance law, and nothing in § 1144 bars a state from reaching the third-party administrator or the network contract.