{"id":368236,"date":"2018-07-06T07:42:51","date_gmt":"2018-07-06T06:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/teething-pains\/"},"modified":"2018-07-06T07:42:51","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T06:42:51","slug":"teething-pains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/teething-pains\/","title":{"rendered":"Teething Pains"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_103446\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-103446\" src=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/07\/Screen-Shot-2018-07-04-at-8.33.40-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"240\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by brownpau | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>An excellent article on CounterPunch a few months back (March 1, 2018) by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/03\/01\/pulling-teeth-how-medicaid-is-failing-the-poor-at-the-dentists-office\/\">Dr. Ronald Maitland<\/a> reveals a \u201cbroken Medicaid dental care system\u201d 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\u2014perfectly good, sound teeth that could have been easily repaired.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d like to expand on this topic and add a few thoughts. Although, as Maitland writes, \u201charsh paywalls segregate the poor from those with even modest dental benefits,\u201d 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\u2014arguably those in most urgent need of dental care\u2014over 50% aren\u2019t covered by any plan. Many of them haven\u2019t seen a dentist in years. Medicare and Medicaid don\u2019t cover the cost of a dental cleaning\u2014this deprivation can be devastating to human health and poses a major public health issue that the dental community has not even begun to address.<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, Medicare ought to cover the entire population&#8211;not just&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/07\/05\/teething-pains\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u201cbroken Medicaid dental care system\u201d 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. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-368236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}