Foundation News: Oral Health

Announcement

On June 26, 2012, Frontline (PBS) will feature “Dollars and Dentists.”  The show description is:

“Dental care can be a matter of life and death. Yet millions of Americans can’t afford a visit to the dentist. An investigation by FRONTLINE and the Center for Public Integrity reveals the shocking consequences of a broken safety net. Poor children, entitled by law to dental care, often cannot find a dentist willing to see them. Others kids receive excessive care billed to Medicaid, or major surgery for preventable tooth infections. For adults with dental disease, the situation can be as dire — and bankrupting. While millions of Americans use emergency rooms for dental care, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars, corporate dental chains are filling the gaps in care, in some cases allegedly overcharging patients or loading them with high priced credit card debt. Correspondent Miles O’Brien investigates the flaws in our dental system and nascent proposals to fix them.”

For more information, please see the PBS website at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dollars-and-dentists/.

New Feature: What we’re reading at REACH

In our work, we come across a number of news items and reports related to the REACH Foundation’s funding priorities and strategic goals. “What we’re reading at REACH” is a collection of links to noteworthy articles that have caught our attention.

Recently, there have been a number of reports and articles on the barriers to access to dental care. Following are stories and reports on this topic:

Kansas Public Radio produced two stories on the registered dental practitioner model that has been presented as one approach to improving the dental workforce shortage in Kansas:

• About the proposed model for Kansas
• About a W.K. Kellogg Foundation study of the quality of dental practitioners worldwide.

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Louis W. Sullivan,  former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services from 1989 to 1993, who wrote in early April about the national dental workforce shortage.

ABC World News produced a report on the difficulty children on Medicaid face in obtaining dental care. 

A report, Dental Crisis in America: The Need to Expand Access, was released and reviewed at the Senate Committee on Health, Labor and Pension’s Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging meeting on February 29, 2012.

Resources & Reports

The report, Dental Crisis in America: The Need to Expand Access, was released and reviewed at the Senate Committee on Health, Labor and Pension’s Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging meeting on February 29, 2012.