It’s fascinating to me, that somehow your teeth are treated as though they have nothing to do with your health - and that they shouldn’t be covered by your health insurance. Dental insurance is rarely helpful; it mostly covers preventive care, and usually carries a steep co-pay.
Nice to know that dentists are doing so well financially, making sure their services stay out of reach for the people who need them most. It’s been a long time since I lived in one place (and had regular income) long enough to have a regular dentist.
But I do remember that he constantly bitched about money, and insurance companies, and HMOs. Finally, I said to him, “Look, you have an expensive house and three cars - that’s your new Saab turbo out in the driveway, right? I’m driving a 20-year-old car, my heart bleeds for you. I don’t want to hear it, okay?”
With dentists’ fees rising far faster than inflation and more than 100 million people lacking dental insurance, the percentage of Americans with untreated cavities began rising this decade, reversing a half-century trend of improvement in dental health.
Previously unreleased figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that in 2003 and 2004, the most recent years with data available, 27 percent of children and 29 percent of adults had cavities going untreated. The level of untreated decay was the highest since the late 1980s and significantly higher than that found in a survey from 1999 to 2002.
Despite the rise in dental problems, state boards of dentists and the American Dental Association, the main lobbying group for dentists, have fought efforts to use dental hygienists and other non-dentists to provide basic care to people who do not have access to dentists.
For middle-class and wealthy Americans, straight white teeth are still a virtual birthright. And dentists say that a majority of people in this country receive high-quality care.
But many poor and lower-middle-class families do not receive adequate care, in part because most dentists want customers who can pay cash or have private insurance, and they do not accept Medicaid patients. As a result, publicly supported dental clinics have months-long waiting lists even for people who need major surgery for decayed teeth. At the pediatric clinic managed by the state-supported University of Florida dental school, for example, low-income children must wait six months for surgery.
Yep, you know the poor by their teeth. When I worked in a homeless shelter in Florida, one of the worst problems in getting the homeless jobs was the state of their teeth. We could give them nice, clean (used) clothes, a fresh haircut, a place to sleep, and prep them for interviews, but when they opened their mouth, the jig was up.
Yeah, the teeth thing has always puzzled me too. They are, after all, somewhat integrated into the rest of our bodies. Why is it our teeth and gums are treated as if they were some unrelated accessories? Poor dental health easily results in poor overall health.
The same thing is true for our eyes. Why do we need a separate plan to cover vision?
I know, I’m using the editorial “we” here in a way that seems to assume “we” all have medical, dental, and vision insurance. I realize that that is far from true. I’m one of the lucky ones who has all three, and that’s only because I live in a state that has done more to make sure its people are covered than just about any other.
I also have a partner who got tired of seeing me uninsured or underinsured for the 20+ years we’ve been together and finally married me so I could be put on her plan. (Thanks, Sweetie!)
My husband had access to military health care/dental care while he was growing up, but it was still very inadequate. Now he’s 31 and has a mouth full of decaying teeth, despite the care he’s taken of his own teeth (there’s only so much brushing and flossing can take care of). He is in dire need of some expert dentistry, but his job doesn’t offer dental insurance and while we make enough money to pay our bills - we can’t afford to pay for his dentistry out of pocket.
I haven’t had a cleaning in over 5 years because of inadequate or nonexistent dental coverage. I imagine there’s a whole bevy of other things wrong with my teeth now that 5 years have passed.
The poor and lower middle class are at a major disadvantage when it comes to health care in this country. As a lower middle class citizen, we’re not poor enough to even make the lengthy waiting lists of medicare, but we aren’t wealthy enough to even take out a dental loan (at extortionary interest rates) without it being financially devastating.
Small and Medium sized businesses are dropping dental off their health plans or the plans they do have are all but useless anyways with deductibles and high copays that is nearly as bad as having no insurance whatsoever (and paying a premium nearly twice that of regular health insurance ANYWAYS).
Health care in general is woefully inadequate for the majority of Americans. The high cost of American health care doesn’t begin with someone getting a major illness and having to be covered by insurance companies who then jack up their rates for everyone else. It begins at birth where the poor are forced to live in substandard health, receive infrequent (if any), substandard care. They can usually only afford the cheapest (and as a result, usually the unhealthiest) foods. This lays the ground work for a huge number of the total population to be at major risk for health problems. We’re already seeing it with skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity and illnesses (like type II Diabetes) that previously only used to present in Adults.
The American healthcare system is so broken and fragmented that there doesn’t appear to be any way to fix it, except to erase everything we know about it now and start over.