Photo by brownpau | CC BY 2.0
An excellent article on CounterPunch a few months back (March 1, 2018) by Dr. Ronald Maitland reveals a “broken Medicaid dental care system” offering little coverage to the poor. Medicaid reimbursement rates, he points out, are so low that the cost of care is borne largely by providers. As a result, private dental practices are restricting the number of their Medicaid patients, causing dental care for the poor to be rationed. And for want of timely treatment, the indigent tend to end up in emergency rooms; and their teeth are often extracted—perfectly good, sound teeth that could have been easily repaired.
I’d like to expand on this topic and add a few thoughts. Although, as Maitland writes, “harsh paywalls segregate the poor from those with even modest dental benefits,” millions of working people receive no dental coverage at all through their employer; and many of those fortunate enough to have some form of dental coverage lose it after they are laid off or when they retire. As for those over the age of 65—arguably those in most urgent need of dental care—over 50% aren’t covered by any plan. Many of them haven’t seen a dentist in years. Medicare and Medicaid don’t cover the cost of a dental cleaning—this deprivation can be devastating to human health and poses a major public health issue that the dental community has not even begun to address.
Needless to say, Medicare ought to cover the entire population–not just…