Consumer Dental Care, a dental insurance plan with headquarters in Calverton and 100,000 members in the state, will be acquired by DentaQuest Ventures Inc. of Massachusetts.
Consumer Dental's staff and management will continue to operate as DentaQuest's mid-Atlantic region providers, Fay Donohue-Rolfe, executive vice president of DentaQuest's parent firm, said yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Members will "still have the same dentist, still have the same card, still have the same price - they'll have the same everything," she said.
While retaining Consumer Dental as HMO-type dental insurance, she said, her company plans eventually to add other dental insurance products under the DentaQuest name.
DentaQuest is a for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit Dental Services of Massachusetts, which runs Delta Dental Plan of Massachusetts. Like Blue Cross plans, Delta Dental plans are local insurers affiliated with a national association, which limits the geographic area in which they can use the Delta trademark.
That means Delta Dental plans can expand only by merging with other Delta plans or by acquiring other dental insurers. The Pennsylvania Delta plan, which, like Consumer Dental, has about 100,000 Maryland members, is owned by a holding company that includes Delta Dental of California.
The Massachusetts Delta plan chose the other route to growth, setting up DentaQuest to make non-Delta acquisitions. Consumer Dental will be its first.
The acquisition is subject to approval by insurance regulators in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia.
Consumer Dental, a 20-year- old operation, is actually three separate companies, all based in Calverton and with 160,000 members in all: Consumer Dental Corp., the Maryland insurer; Consumer Dental Care of Virginia Inc.; and CDC Management Inc., which does claims processing and other administration for both. DentaQuest will acquire all three.
