Imagine if your health insurance -- and for the purposes of this thought experiment, you have health insurance, and it's decent -- covered everything save your liver. For that, you need liver insurance. Or maybe it does cover your liver, but not your right foot. That requires right foot insurance. Or maybe it covers everything but your brain. Got some brain insurance?That's the odd space dental insurance occupies. None would argue that what happens in your mouth is unrelated to your health. An abscessed tooth is considerably more dangerous than a sprained ankle, and diseases that begin in the gums can travel down to the heart. I asked a couple of health wonks if they know why dental care is separate from medical care, but basically got a lot of vague hypotheses about guilds trying to protect their autonomy. What we do seem to know is that the first dental plan was offered in 1883 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway Hosital Association, but only really exploded in the 1950s.The separation of dental insurance from health insurance has some severe consequences though, in particular for the poor. About a third of Americans have no dental insurance, and many more have next to none. When governors increase money for health care, they only occasionally add dental benefits into the mix. As a consequence, Medicaid and similar programs don't offer much in the way of dental care, and when they do offer care, it's limited. As a result, tooth problems that would be treated among those with insurance result in tooth extraction for the poor, either because they've progressed to a point where the tooth isn't salvageable, or because extraction is cheaper (extraction for the poor has all sorts of subsidiary effects, including instantly marking them as poor, and keeping them from being considered for public or front desk jobs). Small issues often worsen till they require major surgery, and in occasional instances, people die, as infections that begin in the mouth take over the organs. For a look at what the poor go through with, see this Seattle Times article. The upshot of all this is that dental care is health care, just like mental health care is health care. Any reforms that ignore those areas are badly, badly flawed.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Warm N Fuzzy.) ASSIGNMENT DESK: THE CURIOUS CASE OF DENTAIL INSURANCE.
Imagine if your health insurance -- and for the purposes of this thought experiment, you have health insurance, and it's decent -- covered everything save your liver. For that, you need liver insurance. Or maybe it does cover your liver, but not your right foot. That requires right foot insurance. Or maybe it covers everything but your brain. Got some brain insurance?That's the odd space dental insurance occupies. None would argue that what happens in your mouth is unrelated to your health. An abscessed tooth is considerably more dangerous than a sprained ankle, and diseases that begin in the gums can travel down to the heart. I asked a couple of health wonks if they know why dental care is separate from medical care, but basically got a lot of vague hypotheses about guilds trying to protect their autonomy. What we do seem to know is that the first dental plan was offered in 1883 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway Hosital Association, but only really exploded in the 1950s.The separation of dental insurance from health insurance has some severe consequences though, in particular for the poor. About a third of Americans have no dental insurance, and many more have next to none. When governors increase money for health care, they only occasionally add dental benefits into the mix. As a consequence, Medicaid and similar programs don't offer much in the way of dental care, and when they do offer care, it's limited. As a result, tooth problems that would be treated among those with insurance result in tooth extraction for the poor, either because they've progressed to a point where the tooth isn't salvageable, or because extraction is cheaper (extraction for the poor has all sorts of subsidiary effects, including instantly marking them as poor, and keeping them from being considered for public or front desk jobs). Small issues often worsen till they require major surgery, and in occasional instances, people die, as infections that begin in the mouth take over the organs. For a look at what the poor go through with, see this Seattle Times article. The upshot of all this is that dental care is health care, just like mental health care is health care. Any reforms that ignore those areas are badly, badly flawed.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Warm N Fuzzy.) 
