Should have been included in Medicaid when it was passed in 1966-7. Democrats compromisedToo bad
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Date: May 2, 2023 at 10:13:07 AM EDT
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Tuesday, May 2, 2023
The dentist will see you nowNorman Rockwell's ads for Crest toothpaste had smiling kids exclaiming "Look, Ma! No Cavities!" and everyone knows that you're supposed to have a dental checkup and cleaning every six months, but when you really need a dentist is when something goes wrong.
And so a class-action federal lawsuit was filed five years ago against the New York State-run Medicaid program for not covering medically necessary dental care for implants, dentures, crowns and endodontics, what the rest of us call root canals. Ouch.
The case settled yesterday, with agreement that Albany will expand its Medicaid policies for these kinds of oral health procedures. For this, patients had to sue? Isn't the goal of Medicaid ? and why New York spends billions and billions on it every year ? to keep low-income people healthy? The last time we looked in the mirror, the teeth are an integral part of the human body, the only 32 adult chompers that you will ever grow and need to last a lifetime.
If teeth are not maintained ? and we're not talking whitening or other cosmetic procedures, but necessary dental work ? the patient's oral health is going to get worse, leading to even more involved necessary dental work to be required and causing other, non-dental medical problems. And sicker people means higher Medicaid expenses to be carried by taxpayers, so it's hard to see what the state thought it was doing before they agreed to provide the enhanced dental coverage.
When the natural teeth have had it, Medicaid would pay for dentures. But only one pair every eight years. If the dentures broke or got lost or stopped fitting, the eight-year clock remained and the toothless, denture-less patient would just have to wait. Did it work that way for pacemakers or other medical devices? Thankfully, no longer.
To live, you must eat. And you need teeth to eat, just like you need a mouth and a stomach and the rest of the guts. All of those anatomical parts were covered by Medicaid, why weren't teeth?
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