Have you ever had a really bad toothache? Like abscessed, need-a-root-canal-right-now bad? I have, more than once. I won’t bore you with the details, except that one experience involved a dentist in still-Communist Yugoslavia long ago who had no novocaine.
If you have had a toothache like that, you know it is pretty impossible to concentrate on anything else. Fortunately, I’ve usually had dental insurance and access to first world health care.
But many people right here in Michigan don’t. Either because they don’t have enough money, can’t find a nearby dentist, or both. And the situation is getting worse.  Nearly two-thirds of all third graders in our Upper Peninsula have a history of dental decay.
Two-thirds of them! Can you imagine trying to learn with a severe toothache? The percentage of third-grade children in Detroit who need immediate dental care is twice the statewide average. Some of this is probably fear – and lack of money.
The number of adults who haven’t see a dentist in the past year has been rising since at least 2010, according to the Michigan Council for Maternal and Child Health. Nearly one-third of all Michigan adults had no dental insurance at all three years ago.
But while some of the failure to take care of our teeth is financial, some is clearly lack of access. Medicaid expansion and Governor Rick Snyder’s Healthy Kids Dental program have meant that tens of thousands of children are eligible for free or almost free dental care, but only about half of those received any kind of dental services last year.
That’s in large part because large parts of our state are federally designated dental shortage areas, where you may have to wait at least six weeks to see a dentist — if you can find one at all. That’s why Michigan needs to follow seven other states and license dental therapists.
This could be a huge and affordable solution to the problem of too little available dental care. Senate Bill 541, introduced last year by Senator Mike Shirkey, contains plenty of safeguards, including clear standards for training, which must include graduation from a college or university sanctioned by the American Dental Association’s Commission on Dental Accreditation.
They’d have to pass a state licensing exam, and practice with and under the supervision of a dentist. But they would provide very badly needed services in many neglected areas, including routine dental care, simple cavity preparation and filling, and simple extractions.
They could pull a bad tooth, in other words, but not your impacted wisdom teeth. Those who have studying the problems low-income people face believe this would be a godsend.
But the Michigan Dental Association has been ferociously lobbying against allowing dental therapists, apparently partly because they fear their own practices — and their checkbooks, might be diminished — and partly because they fear change.
Their opposition reminds me of the way the medical community savagely opposed Medicare and Medicaid itself back in the early 1960s. Today, more than one elderly doctor who opposed Medicaid back in the day has told me he now couldn’t imagine medicine without it.
There is absolutely no reason to oppose establishing a healthy network of Michigan Dental Therapists. That is, if we want a healthier, happier and more productive people, and kids more able and willing to learn.
If you agree, I suggest you contact your state representative and suggest they support this bill and pressure their colleagues to get it done this year. Otherwise, they’ll have to start all over with the new legislature in January – and our citizens need this as soon as possible.
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