Two years.
That’s how long low-income children must wait for procedures that require general anesthesia at the pediatric dental clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry.
“We have babies come to us who already have a mouthful of decay,” said Marcio da Fonseca, who heads UIC’s department of pediatric dentistry and oversees the clinic. “It’s the result of a combination of poor diet, poor oral hygiene, poor parental education and a lack of access to routine care.”
The problem cases go on a waiting list for treatment under general anesthesia that’s more than 800 names long.
Nearly all the clinic’s patients are on Medicaid, da Fonseca said, and because only 1 in 5 private dentists now see Medicaid clients and many aren’t taking new patients, families come to his West Side clinic from as far away as the Quad Cities and Springfield.
Greg Johnson, Illinois State Dental Society executive director, said Medicaid pays Illinois dentists about 20 cents on the dollar, one of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country, and that the number of participating dentists has dropped by more than 40 percent in the last two years.
Patients line up two days in advance for Mission of Mercy events, free weekendlong clinics offered every two years in Illinois for thousands of patients. Nationally, 114 million people have no dental coverage, compared to an estimated 28 million who lack medical coverage. Part of the reason is that many states provide skimpy or nonexistent Medicaid dental benefits for adults.
r-strategists are not designed to ever be happy with what they have. Like an addict, they will rapidly acclimate to whatever level of free resources they are provisioned with, and then they will need more if they are to again acquire the high they are programmed to constantly seek.
Just like an addict, the only thing which can break the cycle is if they are put into withdrawal, and forced to endure the misery that accompanies it. In this case, withdrawal is the natural process by which all resources constrict and everyone is forced to do without for an extended period. As a bonus, it comes with the adjunct therapy of savages and cretins hunting them down and trying to kill them.
After a suitable period of that, everyone leaving everyone else alone to manage their own affairs will suddenly be much more attractive to them.
Spread r/K Theory, because we can’t afford to make everything free
[…] Free Dental Is The Next New Human Right […]
What are uou thoughts on the high death toll of opioids in America? Seeming to concentrate among the white working class?
Long form DRD4 is associated with addiction, from gambling, to drugs, to sex. Even though it is working class whites, which you associate with high K, they may be high K for environmental reasons, rather than genetic. The drugs are culling for the genes, by taking out those that could go r in the face of copious resources. So even though being working class they may be a source of rabbit tendencies in the population in times of glut.
I think it drives K, by limiting the genetic ability to go r.
Well the neurotoxin fluoride, usually industrial waste byproduct sodium fluoride, in the water supply doesn’t help, baby formula cannot be made up with it. Mothers aren’t told this. Dental Fluorosis is the start, really it’s Skeletal Fluorosis, which has many of the same symptoms as Osteoporosis. Osteoporosis isn’t on the rise, they don’t care to diagnose SF due to lawsuits. Also, avoid aluminium, even cans. Links to dementia, senility, Alzheimer’s’.
My dentist was in the faculty dental practice there, and it was the usual story: when resources are free, demand is infinite. When it isn’t free, demand is not infinite. The faculty waiting room was mostly empty; the much larger waiting area for the free student clinic was always full.
I was also a foster parent, and can confirm the difficulty of finding ANY doctor outside the Chicago slums willing to even see any of the kids we cared for under Illinois ex-Governor Blagoyevitch’s “All Kids” so-called insurance program for children in Illinois. Free medical care is meaningless when you can’t actually get any.
I never understood the heightened demand for dental care. I’ve been without a dental plan for a decade or longer. I primarily pay out of pocket for the dentist every few years for a check up and it impresses the dentist each time that flossing, brushing my teeth twice daily, occasionally using antiseptic, and avoiding processed sugar foods and candies seems to be all a person needs to do to maintain a healthy mouth.