Access to Dentists Remains Problem for Low-Income Children on Public Insurance
Rep. Dennis Kucinich held hearings in October on low-income childrens' access to dental care. (WDCpix)
Not even a third of the nation’s lowest-income children receive dental care, and Congress isn’t doing a thing about it.
Although Medicaid, the federal-state partnership covering America’s poorest kids, provides dental coverage for all children enrolled in the program, it’s a phantom benefit for most: roughly 12.6 million kids, or 66 percent, don’t get dental care at all. The reasons vary — from low participation rates among dentists to high frequencies of broken appointments among patients. Yet, despite all the talk this year of improving the nation’s health care system — not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars going toward that effort — none of the bills moving through Congress addresses the dismal discrepancy between dental coverage and access to care for the nation’s most vulnerable youngsters.
“As much talk as there is, there aren’t a lot of
willing to stick their necks out and do it,” said Mike Graham, managing director of government affairs at the American Dental Association.
The lack of dental care in Medicaid can have tragic results. In 2007, Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old Maryland boy suffering an abscessed tooth, was hospitalized when bacteria spread to his brain. Six weeks and two operations later, he died. An $80 procedure might have saved him, but his mother struggled to find a dentist who would accept his insurance plan. He was on Medicaid.
“His life was sacrificed to an uncaring system,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy, said Wednesday during a hearing on Medicaid’s dental benefit. “We can’t have any more Deamonte Drivers out there.”
http://washingtonindependent.com/63449/a-cavity-in-medicaid-dental-coverage
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