FFSA INSIGHTS
Dental Network Leasing:
How One Signature Puts You in Plans You Never Chose
Colorado just did something that ought to make dentists in a lot of other states a little jealous. Starting August 12, 2026, an insurer in Colorado has to get your actual permission before it leases your contracted rate out to some other network you never signed up for. The law is HB26-1070. When the ADA reported it in April, it called the law one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the country.
Read that again. A state had to pass a law just to make insurers ask before renting out your signature.
If you practice anywhere else, the law does not cover you. The lesson underneath it still does.
One Signature, a Dozen Doors
Here is what most dentists never realize. You sign one PPO contract, and that single signature can quietly put you in-network with a stack of umbrella networks you have never heard of. Connection Dental. DenteMax. Zelis. Careington. You did not pick them. You cannot easily leave them, because you do not even know they are there.
That is network leasing. A plan you agreed to rents your discounted rate to plans you never agreed to. Buried in the PPO contract you signed is a clause that lets the carrier hand your rate to third-party networks. Once it does, those networks pay you the discounted fee too.
The FFSA phrase for the fix is simple, and we teach it before anyone touches a contract: trace the leasing, not the logo. The logo on the insurance card tells you almost nothing. The leasing arrangement behind it is where your reimbursement actually gets set. This is why a claim sometimes comes back priced by a plan you would swear you never joined. You are not missing anything, and you are not bad at your job. The connection was built to stay quiet.
Why a Law was Even Needed
Network leasing has always worked in the dark. The rate got leased unless you found the clause, and often you could not find it, because the whole arrangement was designed to be invisible from the front desk. A dentist could go years watching the plans on the wall and never see the umbrella networks riding underneath them. HB26-1070 flips the default. Instead of leasing your rate unless you object, the insurer now has to come to you and get your affirmative consent first. Colorado’s governor signed it, and it takes effect August 12, 2026. That is a real shift, and dentists in the state’s Facebook groups noticed right away. It also raised the question we heard more than any other.
“What About my State?”
That was the first thing dentists asked when this news broke. One tagged a colleague about Texas. Another called out California by name. The appetite for a state-by-state answer is obvious, so here is the straight version.
Colorado’s law is among the strongest, but it is not the only one. More than a dozen states regulate network leasing in some form, and most of those rules are weaker than Colorado’s. They tend to require disclosure, or give you the right to ask for a list of the networks your rate is leased to, rather than forcing the insurer to get your consent before it happens. In plenty of other states there is still no meaningful rule at all. The honest way to say it is that most states still do not force insurers to ask first.
The part that matters more than any statute is this. Your contracts are yours to read no matter where you practice. A law can make an insurer ask permission. It cannot make you open the drawer. The protected dentists are the ones who know what they signed. A good state law helps. Reading your own contracts helps more, and you can start today.
How to Audit your own Contracts this Week
This part is on you, and it takes an afternoon. Read the fine print you skipped the first time.
1. Pull every insurance contract you have signed. All of them, including the ones you forgot about years ago. You cannot audit what you have not gathered.
2. Read for the leasing language. Look for the words leasing, rental, third-party networks, affiliated networks, or participating networks. That is where your rate gets handed to plans you never met.
3. Understand that dropping a plan does not remove you from its leased networks. This is the trap. A dentist cancels the contract they can see, feels finished, and stays quietly in-network with three umbrella networks that were riding on it. You have to trace each one and exit it on purpose.
4. Bill your full fee, never the discounted one. Keep the write-off visible on every statement. You cannot manage a number you have hidden from yourself.
Why This is the Easy Part
Reading your contracts is where the work starts. Everything else builds on it. Once you can see every plan that is actually paying you your PPO rate, you can decide, plan by plan, which ones earn their keep and which ones have to go. You audit, you rank, you prepare, and only then do you drop, one change at a time. That order of operations is the whole difference between a transition that works and the cold-turkey version that has wrecked practices and the people in them.
Colorado dragged one hidden door into the daylight. You can do the same thing for your own practice, in any state, starting this week. Pull the contracts. Read the leasing clauses. Find out who is really paying you.
If you want help learning to read what is actually in your contracts, and building the plan to get out of the ones that no longer serve you, that is what Fee for Service Academy is for. You can see whether your practice is a fit at our Do You Qualify page.