Independent watchdog project. Not affiliated with the State of California, DHCS or Medi-Cal Dental.
Not the State of California
California fines these plans when they break the rules. Two of the three, Liberty and the plan trading as DentaQuest, do dentistry and nothing else, so every fine against them is a dental fine and both ledgers are below in full. The third is Health Net, a large health plan whose file is mostly about medical care, so it gets its own section further down and no total. The documents are linked. You can check all of it.
12
Fines on record, the two dental only plans
24
Years those fines span
$293k
What they add up to
$1,000
Price of not reporting your unresolved grievances
The ledger
Five enforcement actions since 2006, totalling 266,000 dollars. This is the plan that also administers Health Net's dental benefits.
| Date | Penalty | What the regulator cited | Document |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Aug 2026 | $150,000 | Failure to adequately consider an enrollee's grievance. Failure to establish and maintain a department approved enrollee grievance system. Improper cancellation notices. | 23-768 |
| 5 Sep 2025 | $95,000 | Failure to reasonably and efficiently furnish subscribers with contracted health services. Claims paid late or wrongly denied. Failure to maintain books and records. | 24-291 |
| 18 Sep 2025 | $1,000 | Failure to file the quarterly report listing grievances over 30 days old that are still unresolved. | 25-323 |
| 25 Mar 2019 | $15,000 | Marketed and sold a dental product without an order of approval from the regulator, carried on selling it in breach of the Director's order of postponement, and advertised an unapproved product. | 18-818 |
| 26 Jan 2006 | $5,000 | Failure to submit the 2003 and 2004 antifraud annual reports. | 05-246 |
Read these with the dates in mind. California Dental Network (DentaQuest) only began covering Medi-Cal members on 1 July 2025. Not one of the five documents above mentions Medi-Cal or Medicaid, even once. They concern the company's other California dental business, the one where the member pays a monthly premium, and the conduct behind the two largest happened before the Medi-Cal contract existed. The 150,000 dollar action is about an enrollee who paid premiums between July and October 2023. The 95,000 dollar action comes out of an examination of the quarter ending 31 March 2023.
We publish them because they are the record of the company the state handed a Medi-Cal contract to. They are not Medi-Cal failures, and we are not going to dress them up as any.
One thing the public list does not show. The 1,000 dollar document records that the regulator had already dealt with this same failure twice before, in matters 24-388 and 24-756, and wrote to the plan on 5 November 2024 spelling out the deadline. The plan filed late again for the very next quarter. Neither of those two earlier matters appears anywhere in the public enforcement listing, so the ledger you can look up is shorter than the record the regulator holds.
Complete listing: DMHC enforcement actions for California Dental Network, Inc. (DentaQuest)
The ledger
Seven enforcement actions since 2002, totalling 27,000 dollars. Four of them were settled on the same day in February 2025.
| Date | Penalty | What the regulator cited | Document |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 Feb 2025 | $6,000 | Grievance and appeals reporting. | 24-423 |
| 24 Feb 2025 | $2,000 | Grievance and appeals reporting. | 24-422 |
| 24 Feb 2025 | $2,000 | Grievance and appeals reporting. | 24-424 |
| 24 Feb 2025 | $2,000 | Failure to file the quarterly report listing grievances over 30 days old that are still unresolved. | 24-755 |
| 29 May 2015 | $10,000 | Earlier action. See the document for the violations cited. | 14-334 |
| 29 Aug 2005 | $2,500 | Earlier action. See the document for the violations cited. | 05-257 |
| 13 Aug 2002 | $2,500 | Earlier action. See the document for the violations cited. | 02-019 |
Complete listing: DMHC enforcement actions for Liberty Dental Plan of California, Inc.
Read the codes, not the headlines
Every action cites the regulation breached. Line the codes up and two of them keep coming back, both about grievances.
Plans must file a quarterly report listing grievances more than 30 days old that are still unresolved. It is the report that tells the regulator who is waiting.
Liberty was fined 2,000 dollars for missing it in February 2025. DentaQuest's plan was fined 1,000 dollars for missing it seven months later.
Plans must establish and maintain a grievance system the Department has approved. This is the floor, not a refinement.
Cited against California Dental Network (DentaQuest) in August 2026, alongside a finding that it failed to adequately consider an enrollee's grievance. Also cited against Health Net of California.
Why this matters here
Grievances are the only lever a Sacramento member has. They cannot change program, and until 2030 they cannot leave managed care. The complaint is the remedy. These are the rules about handling complaints, and they are the rules that keep getting broken.
For scale
We are not going to tell you what to conclude. We are going to put two numbers next to each other.
Every penalty California has imposed on Liberty Dental Plan of California since 2002, added together. Twenty-four years of enforcement.
Centene's premium and service revenues for 2025, as reported to its shareholders. Centene owns Health Net.
Those two figures describe different companies, and we are not pretending otherwise. The point is the order of magnitude that dental enforcement operates at. A thousand dollars for failing to tell the regulator which members are still waiting is not a number that changes how a company behaves. It is the price of a form.
The bigger files
Health Net is not only a dental plan, and this is where we have to be careful with you.
California's regulator lists 338 documents against Health Net of California, Inc. and 53 against Health Net Community Solutions, Inc. Those are large full-service health plans. The overwhelming majority of those actions concern medical care, not dentistry, and it would be dishonest to wave the number around as though it were a dental figure.
What is worth noting from the current page of each file is the kind of thing cited. Against Health Net Community Solutions: failure to ensure its contracted provider network has adequate capacity and availability of providers, and failure to decide on requests involving imminent or serious threats to a patient's health in time. Against Health Net of California: failure to establish and maintain a department approved enrollee grievance system, the same rule cited against DentaQuest's plan.
Listings: Health Net of California, Inc. and Health Net Community Solutions, Inc.
Document library
Every enforcement letter above, in one place. These are the regulator's own files, not our summaries of them.
The largest dental penalty on record here, including failure to maintain an approved grievance system.
Open documentFailure to reasonably and efficiently furnish subscribers with contracted health services, plus claims handling.
Open documentThe quarterly report naming members whose grievances had passed 30 days without resolution.
Open documentThe largest of four Liberty matters settled on a single day in February 2025.
Open documentThe same quarterly grievance report rule DentaQuest's plan was fined for seven months later.
Open documentCited for failing to ensure its network had adequate capacity and availability of providers. Not a dental-specific action.
Open documentStill to come
A running log of public records requests: what was asked for, when, which agency, and where each one has got to. Plus the DHCS audit reports and corrective action plans, which sit alongside these fines and tell a parallel story.
The reports these plans were fined for not filing are the reports that count people like you. If you have been waiting more than 30 days, we would like to know.