Who writes this, and how
A small editorial desk that works orthodontic costs out of documents anybody can open, and shows the arithmetic. No clinical staff, no reviewer, and no figure that has not been read off a source.
The method, in one paragraph
Find the documents that publish orthodontic money. Read every one of them in full rather than searching them for a convenient line. Enumerate every procedure code in the relevant section and record what the document says — including, and especially, where it says nothing. Quote amounts exactly as printed. Do any arithmetic in a script that ships with the site, so the sums can be re-run rather than trusted. Then write it down with the source attached to each figure.
The documents
Three state payer fee schedules — Illinois, Arkansas and Oklahoma — and the four 2026 FEDVIP dental brochures published by the US Office of Personnel Management, which are official statements of benefits rather than marketing pages. Alongside those: the NHS pages on dental charges and on braces, Medicaid.gov on dental benefits, the NIDCR on finding low-cost care, and the patient pages of the American Dental Association and the American Association of Orthodontists, which are quoted as what they are — material published by professional bodies with an interest in the subject.
Everything read is listed, with its date and its URL, in the site's FACTS file, together with a list of the things we looked for and could not verify. That second list is the more useful one.
There is no dentist behind this
Bracket Math is written by its editorial team. No dentist, orthodontist or other clinician reviews it, and none is named anywhere, because naming one who does not exist would be the worst thing a health-adjacent site could do. You will not find a reviewer in this site's structured data either — the schema describes an organisation and its articles, and claims no clinical credential for anybody.
That limit decides what the site covers. It writes about how treatment is billed, funded and capped, because those are documentary questions. It does not write about what treatment you need, whether an appliance suits your bite, or what any symptom means, because those are clinical questions and the honest answer to every one of them is an examination.
What gets left out
A figure we could not open at its source does not appear. Where two sources disagree and no primary document settles it, no number is printed at all. There are no before-and-after images, no patient stories, no testimonials and no ratings, partly because this fleet forbids them and partly because a desk with no clinical access has no way to verify one.
No practice, chain, group or dental service organisation is named, ranked or linked anywhere on this site. Insurers are named, because comparing published plan documents is the job and those documents are public — but none of them is linked and none pays anything here.
Corrections
Fee schedules are reissued and brochures are rewritten every year, so parts of this site will go stale on a predictable schedule. The most useful message anybody can send is a link to a newer version of a document quoted here. The contact page says where to send it and what happens next.