Not long ago, Dr. Suzanne Fournier saw a 16-year-old patient with a swollen face and difficulty breathing. Fournier, a dentist who practices at an urban hospital in Louisiana, had to extract six of the teen’s teeth; he was eventually intubated and admitted to the intensive care unit because his airways had closed up.
He survived, but Fournier is worried that there will be more children like him across the country who could come close to death because of the state of their oral health. “I really worry that someone is going to die because they have an abscessed cavity that develops into an infection, and they won’t be able to access care,” she says.
In the U.S., 27% of adults don’t have dental insurance, according to the most recent State of Oral Health Equity in America by the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of better oral health care. That’s about 72 million Americans. By comparison, 9.5% of adults don’t have health insurance. And though many children can get dental care through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), low reimbursement rates mean that many dentists won’t accept those insurance plans, leading to dental-care deserts across the country. Only about half of all children on Medicaid used any dental service in a year, according to an analysis by KFF.
Now, dentists say they’re worried that a perfect storm of public-policy changes could further worsen oral health across the country. Proposed cuts to Medicaid would mean that fewer people will be able access dental care, as federal government staffing purges target places like the prevention division of oral health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). What’s more, as states including Florida and Utah vote to ban the addition of fluoride to drinking water and other states consider similar bans, dentists say the oral health of children and adults will suffer.
Source: America’s Dental Health Is in Trouble / TIME Magazine