America's dentists are making it easier on February 21 for nearly a million underserved children to receive needed dental services at more than 5,000 locations throughout the country on the ADA's first Give Kids A Smile/National Children's Dental Access Day. But ADA leaders acknowledge that much more needs to be done before they can declare victory in the war against untreated dental disease in children. "We've been overwhelmed by the response from our members -we may see more than a million children on a single day," said ADA President T. Howard Jones, D.M.D. "But until this country gets serious about ending what we consider to be a national disgrace, children will continue to suffer needlessly with dental disease."
Give Kids A Smile/National Children's Dental Access Day is a nationwide effort by the ADA, state and local dental societies, thousands of individual dentists, and corporate sponsors, that will provide free oral health education, screening and treatment services to children from low-income families.
But equally important, organizers hope to increase awareness of the vast amount of untreated dental disease among the nation's children.
"We refuse to accept the fact that in 21st Century America, thousands upon thousands of children can't eat or sleep properly, can't pay attention in school, can't smile because of untreated dental disease that should have been prevented and now should be treated," said Dr. Jones.
In his landmark report, "Oral Health in America," U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher said oral health care is the most prevalent unmet health need among American children, calling oral disease a "silent epidemic." Children from low-income families in particular face barriers to access to dental care, including lack of health insurance and underfunding of state and federal public health insurance programs that are supposed to help them obtain dental care.
According to the surgeon general's report, children with no medical insurance are 2.5 times less likely than insured children to receive dental care. And children with no dental insurance are three times more likely to have an unmet dental need. The report's review of state Medicaid dental programs revealed chronic underfunding, which deters dentists from participating in the programs. On average, state Medicaid agencies contribute only about two percent of their child health expenditures to dental care. A survey by the ADA revealed that only about 26 percent of responding dentists regularly treat Medicaid patients.
"We don't need every dentist to participate in Medicaid. But we do need the states to make some commonsense reforms that will make it possible for more of us to do so," said Dr. Jones. Give Kids A Smile will help nearly a million children on this one day, but our larger purpose will be to deliver the message that the dental profession alone cannot eliminate these barriers to dental care.
Dr. Jones said dentists already deliver a substantial amount of donated and non-reimbursed dental care to children. In 1996, non-reimbursed care amounted to $2.6 billion, or about 19 percent of all children's dental care, according to a report in the April 2002 Journal of the American Dental Association. Another ADA study found that the amount of care that dentists give away exceeds the total amount funded by government.
"For lower-income children, donated and non-reimbursed care by dentists is even more significant, reaching over 40 percent of per patient spending that below-poverty-level children received in 1996," explained Dr. Jones. "This represents a remarkable contribution by the nation's dental professionals. But we know that charity alone will never fix the problem, because charity is not a health care system."
For more information about oral health care and the ADA, visit www.ada.org.