My Visit to the Dentist
A couple of years ago David Shipler wrote a book entitled, The Working Poor. One of the gut wrenching stories he tells is about a woman who never made more than $10/hour. She had severe problems with her teeth, because she couldn’t go to the dentist. She had to get all of her teeth pulled out to get Medicaid to pay for a set of dentures. But the dentures didn't fit, so she couldn’t wear them. So no teeth. Hard to imagine someone giving her a good job where she works in ongoing contact with the public. She could never get the kind of job that would allow her to move up.
I, on the other hand, have very good teeth. In fact, they
might be the most reliable part of my body. Maybe it’s good genes, maybe it’s the fluoride they started putting in the Kansas water when I was a kid. Bottom line, I have never had dental work beyond a routine cleaning – even after going one stint of a few years without going to the dentist. I went for a routine cleaning today, but instead of my usual $5 co-pay, I plunked down a big chunk of money. No, my teeth didn’t all of a sudden begin rotting. Two things are at play here – 1) I moved to New York about 6 years ago, and as part of my transformation into a New Yorker, I began grinding my teeth, so I need a night guard; and 2) because of a minor malformation in a tooth, I need an onlay to prevent problems down the road.
So what’s the point? Unlike the woman in Shipler’s book, I actually have dental insurance. There’s no guarantee, of course, that if that woman had my dental insurance, she would still have her teeth. Plenty of people diligently take care of their teeth and still need route canals and dentures. Thing about my dental insurance, though, is that it covers little more than routine cleanings. So here I am, someone who takes care of her healthy teeth, who still had to plunk down close to $1000 this morning. And believe me, that’s a frightening sum of money to have to pay out. But I’ll recover from it.
There’s a lot of talk in this presidential race about universal health care coverage (let’s be naïve and assume for a minute that that includes dental). We should all be for that. But it’s going to take more than making sure people have the lowest common denominator of health insurance. It has to be quality coverage. Health insurance that covers annual physicals but doesn’t cover treatment for diseases or, god forbid, chronic illness – or dental insurance that covers only routine cleanings -- may not actually do the poor, or the near poor, all that much good.
P.S. My dentist thinks fluoride in the water is a bad idea and that eventually it will give me some terrible illness in the future – good thing I have decent health insurance.
