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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – For months now, we have been absorbed in a collective conversation about healthcare reform. Across the country people have been attending town hall meetings in droves offering ideas on how to reform the current healthcare system.
President Obama has assured Americans that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor and if you like your health plan, you can keep that too.” As someone who has been a dentist for 27 years and now as a member of the management team at a dental insurance company, I know that when it comes to dental insurance, this promise will be broken if current reform bills are passed.
From my vantage point, no one is talking about an important piece of legislation that affects nearly 200 million people. As a matter of fact, in the healthcare reform debate today, there is no talk, no debate, no awareness and no spotlight on the impact to current dental insurance coverage – and there should be.
Here’s why:
It is widely believed that early prevention and detection of disease saves lives. Dentists are often on the front lines when it comes to the detection of disease symptoms, often much earlier than primary care physicians – 120 diseases and conditions can be diagnosed in the mouth.
The need for dental care is not the issue – over the past two decades the number of Americans securing dental benefits has nearly doubled, reaching 176 million at year-end 2008. Clearly, people value dental care and utilize it on a regular basis, increasing the likelihood of preventing or diagnosing other conditions as well. The issue is that dental coverage is at risk for millions of people across the country.
Unknown to most Americans, current healthcare reform bills mandate that children’s dental insurance be folded into general medical insurance plans. By folding children’s dental coverage into overall medical coverage, one of the unintended consequences is likely to be that integrated family dental benefits covering 132 million Americans currently, are no longer available. Because dental plans are structured to include both adult’s and children’s coverage, splitting children from other family members dismantles the offering for full families.
Additionally, 99% of dental benefits are provided separately from medical coverage with “stand-alone plans.” Dental insurance is predominately designed and sold by separate companies that are specialists in this market. Today, medical plans, for the most part, do not have the infrastructure to deliver integrated dental coverage and building such capabilities will simply slow implementation and add to the cost of overall reform, already one of the major obstacles in providing healthcare to citizens.
Ironically, dental care is one part of the current healthcare system that is not broken. Americans utilize dental coverage for themselves and their families at staggering success rates when considering overall healthcare use – 77% of Americans with benefits go to the dentist at least once a year contrasted with only 21% of people with medical benefits who get annual physicals.
Surely, if Americans were aware of the consequences of reform legislation on dental care I believe they would argue that it’s a type of coverage they would not want changed, one that’s not broken. The problem is that while the more attention-grabbing aspects of health reform are important, they are taking attention away from other lesser-known aspects of care. Virtually no attention has been given to the impact on current dental coverage as part of the reform debate.
As the popular saying goes, “the devil is in the details” and this is one of the details no one is paying attention to. At the next town hall meeting, I hope someone asks why we won’t have a choice in keeping our current family dental coverage plan – and why we would try to fix a part of our health system that isn’t broken.
Richard A. Goren, DDS – Guardian Life Insurance Company of America / National Dental Director
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