At a May 16 hearing of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension Committee, experts made the case for adding comprehensive dental coverage to Medicare and Medicaid insurance.
In her written testimony, Lisa Simon, M.D., D.M.D., an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that working as a dentist in a community health center “broke my heart. The wait for my services routinely exceeded four months, and I was often forced to extract teeth I could have saved because of insufficient Medicaid funding.”
Simon eventually went to medical school to work on the crisis in oral health from both sides of the aisle. “Through medical school, I practiced dentistry at the Suffolk County Jail, where I had multiple patients tell me that the only good thing to happen to them since being incarcerated was that they finally got to see a dentist,” she said.
She noted that Medicare has been barred from providing a dental benefit since 1965, causing substantial harms to seniors and people with disabilities. “This must be reversed. Fewer than half of Medicare beneficiaries see a dentist each year; when they do, they spend more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on their care.”
Patients delay dental care due to cost more than any other healthcare service.