Dental Problems Are Not Only In UK
- Details
- Published: Thursday, 03 April 2025 10:30
- Written by Peter Ingle
- Hits: 673
The headline will be familiar to those with even a passing interest in the UK dental scene.
“Hard working families are struggling to cover basic health costs”
Another story speaks of “dental deserts” as well as, “a new surge of tooth decay.”
But these are not taken from another BDA or Liberal Democrat press release, but current headlines from Ireland and the USA.
Corklive reports that charges to see dentists in the Republic are now the highest in Europe with an increase of over 20% in the last four years.
Figures from the Irish Central Statistics Office revealed the sharp rises in the cost of medical and dental treatment. This includes the four out of ten Irish people who are paying for private health insurance, on top of the taxes funding the public health system.
Many Irish people too, are traveling abroad for procedures such as dental implants. An estimated 12,000 Irish people visited Hungary alone in 2024 lured by the claims that they would be paying up to 70% less than they would in Ireland.
Fintan Hourihan of the Irish Dental Association said that the upward trend in dental fees reflected the general rising costs businesses faced following the cost of living crisis, with associated increases in everything from utility bills to pay rates.
Across the Atlantic a dental public health double whammy is developing. For the many rural Americans in dental deserts who are facing access problems, things may be about to get a lot worse, with the prospect of water fluoridation being withdrawn.
A recent study from Harvard University set out to measure the extent of US dental deserts. It concluded that nearly 25 million Americans live in areas without enough dentists, more than double previous estimates. Hawazin Elani, a Harvard dentist and epidemiologist who co-authored the study, explained to CNN that many shortage areas are rural and poor, and depend heavily on Medicaid. But many dentists do not accept Medicaid because of the low level of payments available.
The American Dental Association has estimated that no more than a third of dentists accept patients under Medicaid. “I suspect this situation is much worse for Medicaid beneficiaries,” Elani said speaking of the access challenges. “If you have Medicaid and your nearest dentists do not accept it, then you will likely have to go to the third, or fourth, or the fifth.”
Meanwhile, in the wooded highlands of northern Arkansas, where small towns have few dentists, water officials who serve more than 20,000 people have for more than a decade openly defied state law by refusing to add fluoride to the drinking water.
For its refusal, the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority has received hundreds of state fines amounting to about $130,000, which are stuffed in a cardboard box and left unpaid, according to Andy Anderson, who is opposed to fluoridation and has led the water system for nearly two decades. It is among hundreds of rural American communities that face both a dire shortage of dentists, and a lack of fluoridated drinking water.
With the the anti-fluoride movement building unprecedented momentum, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being appointed as the Health and Human Services Secretary, it may turn out that the Ozarks were not behind the times after all. Many communities have decided to stop fluoridating in recent months, and state officials in Florida and Texas have urged their water systems to do the same. Utah which has just has become the first state to ban its addition to tap water.
There are many differences between the problems faced by the USA, Ireland and the UK, though currently more than 70% of the U.S. population on public water systems get fluoridated water, a level of distribution the UK has never remotely approached. However, seeing the same challenges faced under a variety of systems suggests that our own difficulties cannot be blamed solely on the UDA contract.
You need to be logged in to leave comments.
Report
My comments