"The Affordable Care Act should be expanded to include adult dental care"
The Affordable Care Act should be expanded to include adult dental care, writes guest columnist Ron Inge.
By Ron Inge
BIG changes are coming to Washington health care in 2014. While much of the focus is currently on medical care, there are some important changes and strides happening on the dental front.
In the first phase of the Affordable Care Act in Washington, the state’s new health-insurance exchange will begin enrolling people Oct. 1, with coverage starting Jan. 1...this will greatly increase access to oral care for previously uninsured children across the state. Unfortunately, adult dental care is not included in the Affordable Care Act.
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Luckily, through the recent reinstatement of dental coverage to eligible Medicaid adults and the hard work of the Washington Dental Service Foundation, 250,000 Washingtonians will again have dental coverage beginning in 2014. As a former practicing dentist I’m excited by this change, but I’m concerned that many adults still won’t receive the dental care they need.
So, what is the solution?
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., has introduced a bill to add adult dental care to the Affordable Care Act in 2015. I hope that the Washington state Congressional delegation will support the bill.
- more -
http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coverage/MedicareDentalCoverage/index.html?redirect=/MedicareDentalCoverage
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings on Wednesday introduced legislation to address the dental crisis in America. The bills would expand dental coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The legislation was filed one week after a new government study documented skyrocketing costs and limited access to dental care.
The Government Accountability Office found that Americans spent about $108 billion on dentists in 2011 at charges that varied greatly for the same service. The GAO report was prepared for the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, which Sanders chairs. The panel last week held a hearing that also examined inadequate insurance coverage and government policies that discourage preventative care.
“When people cannot get to a dentist when they need one, they often end up in emergency rooms. It just doesn’t make sense for us to spend so much money on those who wind up in hospitals but refuse to help people get the care they need before it’s too late,” Sanders said.
Cummings, the House sponsor, said the legislation “puts us on the path to universal access by increasing the availability of care and expanding coverage to veterans, seniors, and low-income Americans. This is a critical step to addressing the vast differences in health care outcomes we see in our society.”
The Comprehensive Dental Reform Act of 2013 is supported by the American Association of Public Health Dentistry, the American Dental Hygienists’ Association, the Children’s Dental Health Project, the Pew Children’s Dental Campaign and others.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/open-wide-09-18-2013
Medicare does not provide dental coverage.
The dental exclusion was included as part of the initial Medicare program. In establishing the dental exclusion, Congress did not limit the exclusion to routine dental services, as it did for routine physical checkups or routine foot care, but instead it included a blanket exclusion of dental services.
The Congress has not amended the dental exclusion since 1980 when it made an exception for inpatient hospital services when the dental procedure itself made hospitalization necessary.
http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coverage/MedicareDentalCoverage/index.html?redirect=/MedicareDentalCoverage
It's Obamacare.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023715400
= new reply since forum marked as read
I've been nearsighted my whole life and now I'm in bifocals.
I got glasses in the second grade and needed them before that. The woman who came in to school with her light box with Es on it--I kept saying "I can't see that" from ten feet away and she never heard me. She never said anything to the teacher either.
My mom wondered why I had my nose in a book and found out when she took me to the eye doctor and she felt stupid.
Mom and Dad had perfect vision and only wore reading glasses so it did not occur to them that I might need glasses. Now they have vision, speech and hearing screening in Texas in the first grade to catch these things.
My focusing distance in my GOOD EYE is about six inches.
In my bad eye it's about four inches.
I'm what they call a high minus. Minus diopters mean you're nearsighted. A diopter is a meter.
I'm a minus 9.25 in my bad eye. A minus diopter is a reciprocal fraction.
Divide 39.37 inches by 9.5 and you'll get my focusing distance.
Wearing contacts knocks about 2 diopters off my scrip because it sits on my eyeball.
I can be corrected to 20/15 in contacts, which cannot be done in glasses. As far as bifocals w/contacts, one eye is for distance and one eye is for near vision and my brain fuses them.
It's called "monovision".
As far as teeth, you can die from an abscessed tooth if the infection gets in your blood. You can then die from septicemia, a/k/a blood poisoning. Some teenager in Chicago a few years ago did not have $80 to get a tooth pulled, but Cook County had $250,000 to spend on him in intensive care when he went into a coma and died from blood poisoning.
