Dental Care for Kids

I've slowly been getting more involved in the local schools. I went to two town council meetings in the past month to make sure that our schools were properly funded, despite the school budget going down. Unlike some other towns in the state, our town council demanded draconian cuts. I attended several school foundation meetings. I even ran the potato sack race at yesterday's Field Day.

At this week's foundation meeting, one the school nurses asked the foundation for help as she applied for grants to help the children receive free dental care. There are many self-employed and under-employed people in town who can't afford to buy private dental insurance. The number of families in town that qualify for the free lunch program is up 26 percent. While they can qualify for state-run health insurance for their children, there isn't a state subsidized dental program.

The nurse is an adorable woman. When Jonah was in Kindergarten, he was in her office every day getting patched up for some playground misstep. She was incredibly kind to him and I'll always be grateful to her.

Unfortunately, this woman has to deal with more than Jonah's skinned knees. She said that a large number of the kids enter school without ever visiting a dentist. She's seen them loose adult teeth and deal with the pain of untreated cavities. While there are free dental clinics in the urban areas, people forget that poverty exists in suburban areas. She was applying for grants to hire buses to take these poor families to the urban dental clinics. 

Despite this era of budgetary stress, we still have to find a way to make good policies.

Comments

[PhilosopherP]

This may be an area you could cooperate with a local community/technical school. Our dental assisting students do a lot of fundraising for the Smile networ and other community work. They also do a lot of volunteer work -- while they don't do the same work as dentists, they could do screenings and their programs usually know about local resources for poor folks to get dental care.

A Saturday dental screening clinic could help parents and kids. You know that if the kids aren't going to the dentist, neither are their parents.

[MH]

I haven't been to a dentist since 2000. I have coverage, I'm just afraid at what they'll find at this point.

[lmc]

MH, find a good one (like a low pain one) and go. Root canals aren't that painful anymore. (Although hopefully you don't have conjoined nerve roots or double roots, or other fun things that might require a multi-visit procedure.) Coverage doesn't cover everything--they'll argue for the silver fillings over white ones, the company--but it does help.

I went from 2003 until 2009 without a visit, and I probably wouldn't have gone if not for the sort of scraped/sore feeling I had in one tooth. Fortunately it was only cavities (though more than I would have liked). Much longer, and it'd have been a root canal. (And my teeth were over-florided when I was a child, even.)

[Ally]

hmm...I was told that Medicaid paid for dental work for those under the age of 21...

For those doing a little better financially and don't qualify for that though - it does seem to be a big problem...

[Tasha]

Poor kids don't need dental insurance, they need dental care. The economics of dentistry are, for the most part, different from other health care, one of the reasons dentists fought in the 1990s against inclusion in Clinton's health care proposal.

Basic cleaning, checkups, fluoride, and minor cavities for kids in low income families can/should be paid for without insurance. So put your energies to finding dentists who'll provide low cost treatment, and finding funding sources to cover those issues.

[Amy P]

"Poor kids don't need dental insurance, they need dental care."

Right. I tried to post earlier on this, but lost my comment. You're not exactly home free if you have dental insurance--the last time I had serious work, we had hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses for each visit. Our current plan (a reimbursement program) covers about 50% of dental costs, but it's structured to encourage cleanings and exams (as I recall, the first $100 or so of care per person per year is "free") and incentivize good dental habits.

[Wendy]

"Basic cleaning, checkups, fluoride, and minor cavities for kids in low income families can/should be paid for without insurance."

Perhaps coincidentally, these procedures are all (maybe with exception of cavities) most often performed by dental hygienists, who are usually underpaid women working part-time, at least in my dentist's office.

[lmc]

Amy P: Damn, that's a good plan in my experience with dental plans.

(I can't believe my student representatives fought so hard for dental care from our university, and came up with such a crappy plan that I just pick my own dentist and pay out of pocket. Our vision plan's much better.)

[jen]

This thread is probably dead by now, but typically the problem with Medicaid for dental is that very few dentists accept the very low, and often tardy, Medicaid payments. Remember that Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is state-funded and thus is in big trouble this year. In my own home state of Illinois, many service providers are going under because the state is severan months behind in making any payments to them.

FWIW, I just started a new job, and the much-vaunted dental insurance is so crappy that 5 minutes of math shows it's smarter to just pay out of pocket using an HSA.

[dave.s.]

Jen, never give up. You can revive any thread! with a sufficiently juicy post. We have been unhappy with our dentals, mostly because orthodontia is a two-year-wait procedure, and we used to have it on my wife's plan, which she lost along with her job.
Dental has a big moral hazard problem: lots of procedures you can do now, or do next year. One of my coworkers three jobs ago used to take dental insurance one year in three, get all his crowns etc. and then drop it.