Shreveport, LA -- When a man recently visited an emergency room here with a toothache, consulting physician Alan Sorkey quickly diagnosed the dental infection was serious and even potentially fatal.
The patient was on more than 25 medications and scheduled for a major surgery, not dental related, all covered by government health care programs, Sorkey said.
Those same programs wouldn't cover the estimated $70 to pull the rotting tooth. The patient didn't have the money for it, and a local low-cost oral surgery clinic had a wait of as long as a year for an appointment, he said.
"All of this care the patient had received would have been for naught because these programs generally do not cover dental-related problems," said Sorkey, who ultimately persuaded the clinic to see the patient sooner. "In his immune-compromised situation, this infected tooth threatened to take his life without immediate treatment."
While government-managed health care programs such as Medicaid pay for emergency room visits for adult enrollees seeking temporary relief from toothaches, tooth abscesses and other dental emergencies, coverage of outpatient dentist office treatment for those problems varies greatly from state to state, according to a 2011 federal Medicaid report.
Federally mandated preventive and other dental care usually ends when Medicaid recipients enter early adulthood. That leaves states to determine whether they will provide dental benefits to adult Medicaid patients and if so, what type and how much.
Ten states including Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Missouri, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington, offer no Medicaid dental benefits to adults, the report shows. The remaining offer a hodgepodge of services that leave many of those adults with inadequate and limited access to dental care, according to the American Dental Association.
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USA Today