About 12 days after I turned 40, I started to notice that I was having trouble concentrating on the newspaper. Couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to pay attention to the stories I was reading. I realized, too, that I wasn’t reading books as often.

Then I remembered. I am now 40. My vision is going. Sure enough, I got eyeglasses for the first time about a month later. And I was happy that my company offered vision coverage as part of my health insurance.

Likewise, the dental coverage has been nice. My daughter just ended five years of braces; I expect my son will be starting soon enough.

But increasingly, dental and vision coverage are among the first to go when employers try to figure out how to control their costs — especially health insurance costs.

According to our story for Wednesday’s Post-Dispatch, “Only about half of the nation’s employers offered dental coverage in 2006. In the Midwest, it drops to 45 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest health think tanks.”

Martin said it’s important to remember that unlike health insurance, dental coverage is not meant to provide catastrophic coverage. “We’re covering low cost high frequency services, medical’s covering high-cost, low-frequency services,” said Pam Martin, COO of Delta Dental. “Medical is true insurance, we’re providing financial assistance.”

Does your employer provide dental or vision coverage? Do you manage without it? How should employers deal with health insurance costs?