With all of the rage on Kos today focusing on the "color" on John McCain's teeth, I thought this might be a good time for discussing the cost of dental care and the ability of the impoverished to receive quality dental care. Being one who grew up poor, let me be the first to say that I have had a lot of dental work done in my adult years, and the cost has now even surpassed my ability to pay for it. All of those old cavities now require "caps" or "crowns" with "root canals", at an average cost of $1500 to $2000 per tooth.
Even just a regular teeth cleaning visit might cost the average person $150 plus or minus, with x-rays. Without dental insurance, I am not keeping up with my "dental care", as I am struggling just to make it with a stagnant income and increasing costs. On the other hand, if an emergency arose, I would find a way. But what about the poor?
Lower income and education levels are tied to poor dental health, according to a study based on data from more than 15,000 people living in North Carolina, Mississippi, Minnesota and Maryland.
Researchers found that the lower a person's income and education level, the more likely that person would suffer from severe periodontitis, or advanced gum disease that can lead to tooth loss.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/...
Over the years, I have read about the growing inability of the poor to access or afford dental care, and at no time was it more evident to me than during the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Remember the faces of all the poor people who didn't have access to transportation out of New Orleans? Remember the toothless grins of those finally just finding someone willing to help them out of the convention center? Some did notice...
The Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation began providing dental care to the evacuees of Hurricane Katrina in Beaumont,Texas aboard a mobile dental vehicle on Sept. 7, while stepping up other efforts to help the evacuees in Texas and other states.
The Tzu Chi dental vehicle, a mobile dental clinic equipped with advanced instruments, is owned by the Los Angeles-based Tzu Chi Free Clinic. Tzu Chi volunteers drove it to Beaumont on Sept. 6, a 1,500-mile journey that took over 40 hours.
On the first day of service, 53 patients registered. Almost all of the patients had their teeth pulled. Some medicines required for the patients were provided by the local Red Cross.
http://www.reliefweb.int/...
Here are some snippets from a NY Times 1999 article about poor children and dental care:
Two-year-old Bryana Gammel's rosebud lips gaped open, held by a retractor, to reveal baby teeth that were rotted down to the gum line. Her long lashes lay against her cheeks in the forced sleep of anesthesia.
One by one, Dr. Jay Afrow's delicate forceps gripped, wiggled and wrenched out the decay-stained teeth, until they lay, like tiny arrowheads, on a surgical tray. Six of them.
He was doing Bryana a great service, but Dr. Afrow was not happy. ''This is not the way you want a 2-year-old to grow up,'' he said.
His practice here is a window onto a chronic national problem affecting millions of children, a striking rich-poor inequality that is only lately beginning to attract concerted Federal attention and action in Congress, the White House and health agencies.
http://query.nytimes.com/...
With an economy growing ever worse, here is an article from 2008:
Fewer than a third of Maryland's nearly 500,000 Medicaid children were seen by a dentist in 2006, according to a study that found a chronic shortage of pediatric dentists willing to deal with Medicaid paperwork.
Experts consider the situation serious, since a lack of routine dental care can lead to pain and illness that disrupts eating, sleep and learning, and can even lead to death.
http://wjz.com/...
As more and more dental offices crop up offering high tech dental services, mostly for aesthetic purposes at premium prices, dentists serving the poor or even the average working person are becoming much more difficult to find.
My own dentist of nearly 30 years committed suicide 2 years ago after discovering an office employee embezzled nearly $75,000 from him, leaving him essentially bankrupt and owing IRS. He was probably one of the last of the last of those truly caring dentists, who never charged more than you could afford, or performed dentistry you didn't need. I had a running "balance" with him, as I know many of his patients did who couldn't afford to pay it all up front.
How about other dentists and those who need care?
For American dentists, times have never been better.
The same cannot be said for Americans’ teeth.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
While many are annoyed with Kos for that McCain picture today, perhaps the best thing that may come out of the discussion is a focus of dental health care and access to it suffered by Americans. Health insurance receives a lot of focus, but lack of dental care can also contribute toward poor health, and even death....
While people talk about the need for better health-care often, dental care is often overlooked. Though 8 million kids lack health care, three times as many -- more than 25 million -- don't have dental care.
For the poorest children who are on Medicaid, dental care can be difficult to find.
Deamonte Driver was a typical 12-year-old boy. He died from tooth decay.
http://abcnews.go.com/...