Health Insurance Needs to Cover More Dental

Health care and health insurance in America continues to be a hot topic throughout the nation. It's too expensive, not comprehensive enough, and there's a lot of inconsistency. Health care reform hopes to fix some of these issues, but it's going to be years before that is fully implemented and Americans start feeling the effects of the changes. One thing that needs to change sooner than later is access to quality dental care. The article found on the LA Times by Jenny Gold about improving dental care says that 4.6 million children did not visit the dentist in 2008 because their family could not afford the cost. And about 60% of retired people did not have dental coverage even if they had Medicare. These numbers are not acceptable, and hopefully through reform they will improve.

Until then, advocates of dental care are working to make quality services readily available to needy patients. The Institute of Medicine is offering up some new ideas to get the ball rolling and make dental coverage a reality for more Americans. One idea is to encourage more dental students from minority, low-income areas. They also suggest investigating the expansion of Medicaid to cover more adults rather than just children. And by increasing reimbursement rates for dentists, research shows more children will get teeth cleanings based on a report completed by Sandra Decker of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Journal of the American Medical Association. These may seem like minor efforts, but this is what we need to move in the right direction and truly improve dental care in America. Health insurance is far from perfect and we should always be making strides to try and improve policies and procedures.