Interestingly, I've seen only one or two articles about this issue from other
sources. It's as if dental problems were not medical issues at all, the way
they are ignored by people who write about the right to medical care for all.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, June 04, 2017 7:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Deep class divide means some pay for brighter teeth,
workers lose theirs
http://themilitant.com/2017/8123/812306.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 23 June 12, 2017
(front page)
Deep class divide means some pay for brighter teeth, workers lose theirs
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
The carnage visited on working people by capitalism’s economic and social
crisis today includes millions of workers unable to get essential dental work
done, given the astronomical costs involved in paying for root canals, crowns
or other such procedures. Instead, many end up having their teeth pulled.
Nearly 20 percent of those over 65 do not have a single real tooth left.
A product of sharpening class divisions that target working people, this
reality is graphically described in “The Painful Truth About Teeth,” an article
in the May 13 Washington Post.
High-end cosmetic dentistry is booming, with members of the propertied ruling
families and their upper middle class meritocratic backers spending “well over
$1 billion each year just to make their teeth a few shades whiter,” the Post
said. At the same time, many workers — even those who have full-time jobs —
don’t have the money for basic dental care.
Millions of these workers are forced to rely on charity clinics or hospital
emergency rooms to deal with infected and painful teeth.
Hundreds lined up at one such clinic in Salisbury, Maryland, in mid-May,
waiting hours to see volunteer dentists, whose “care” consisted mainly in
pulling teeth.
“The country is way too divided between well-off people and people struggling
for everything — even to see the dentist,” Dee Matello, 46, who hadn’t seen a
dentist in nearly a decade, told the Post. “And the worst part is, I don’t see
a bridge to cross over to be one of those rich people.” For years she had been
suffering pain from a shattered molar.
Matello — like a number of workers living in industrial and farming areas, many
of them Caucasian, had voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008 and then
Donald Trump in 2016 — in hopes of seeing a change from devastating living and
working conditions she faced.
Last year more than 2 million people went to the emergency room because of
dental problems. Untreated tooth infections can spread in the body and lead to
disease and heart problems. And tooth loss can make it more difficult to eat
and speak, not to say of what it does to your appearance and self-confidence.
“What I am seeing is absolutely horrifying,” the Post reported George Acs,
director of the dental department at Chesapeake Health Care clinic in Maryland,
told the state legislature. ER doctors just pass out “a perpetual cycle of
antibiotics and opioids,” he said. And this cycle spreads the opioid addiction
epidemic throughout the U.S.
Adding to the scourge of tooth decay is large numbers of workers and farmers in
rural areas, and growing numbers in cities as well, who don’t have access to
fluoridated water. The chemical fluoride, which reduces tooth decay, began
being added to public water systems in the 1940s.
Today fluoridated water is available to some three-quarters of the U.S.
population. But 80 million people don’t have access to treated water.
Some of them draw their water from wells. Others have been seduced by a massive
profit-thirsty advertising blitz to use “naturally pure” bottled water — which
isn’t fluoridated — instead.
More than one-third of U.S. adults have no dental insurance, according to the
American Dental Association. Dental problems aren’t considered medical problems
in the U.S., thanks to insurance industry bosses and their muscle with
government officials, and aren’t covered by medical insurance. And those
workers who are able to get dental coverage face high premiums and limited
benefits.
Medicare, which covers 55 million people aged 65 and over and those workers who
succeed in running the bureaucratic gauntlet to get disability, doesn’t cover
any kind of dental care, even though older workers suffer from the most serious
oral health problems.
Some 72 million people have fought their way onto Medicaid, but under this
federal program dental care for children is left up to the states.
About half of children on Medicaid did not receive a single dental service in
2012.
Less than half of state governments cover dental care for adults who manage to
get Medicaid. And only 38 percent of dentists accept Medicaid, the Post said.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
