By Mary Otto
Is the lack of dental care for senior citizens a concern in your area? Have health officials in your state explored the consequences of the shortage of dental care for community-dwelling seniors, or those living in nursing homes? Is a nonprofit or community organization taking a creative approach to meeting the need?
The nonprofit Oral Health America periodically publishes a state-by-state report card that analyzes oral health among elders. How did your state do on the most recent “State of Decay” report card?
Last year, San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Paul Sisson took a look at an innovative program that is bringing dental care to seniors in that city.
In her story for the Baltimore Sun, reporter Andrea K. McDaniels learned that in Maryland, a survey of adults at senior centers, nutrition centers, assisted living centers and nursing homes found significant numbers were going without care.
“Officials found that 46 percent of Marylanders living in nursing homes had untreated tooth decay,” she wrote. “Twenty-four percent of those surveyed at nutrition sites had severe inflammation of the gums.”
Janet Yellowitz, director of special care and geriatrics in the University of Maryland School of Dentistry’s Department of Oral Surgery told McDaniels, “Too many of the elderly ignore the dental disease for a while and it never gets better.”
And a recent study by the University of North Carolina found that oral health problems outranked other adversities in contributing to malnutrition among elderly patients.
In their ongoing national campaign to add a dental benefit to Medicare, leaders at the Santa Fe Group, a nonprofit oral health think tank, acknowledged that achieving the goal of will not happen overnight, as Phil Galewitz, of Kaiser Health News, learned in his reporting for a detailed March story on the effort.
“Santa Fe understands the uphill climb for coverage, but its sights are set on the 2020 elections,” said Dr. Claude Earl Fox, a former senior health official in the Clinton administration who now leads the group’s effort. The strategy is to build public demand for a Medicare dental benefit so that every major presidential candidate will support it the next time around, Galewitz wrote.
“We have a long road to go, but we think it’s doable and there will be a growing audience for this,” said Fox, who has been a professor at the Johns Hopkins and University of Miami medical schools since his career in federal government.
The Santa Fe Group has issued a white paper taking a deep look at the costs and benefits of adding dental coverage to Medicare. The paper includes a host of useful references to additional research on the issue.
A Medicare dental benefit could cost from $4.4 billion to $16.2 billion a year, depending on the range of services covered, how much seniors would be expected to pay out-of-pocket and the level of premium subsidies provided to lower-income beneficiaries, researchers concluded in a study published in Health Affairs last December.
“Most of the talk in Medicare reform is how do we reduce cost rather than expand costs, and adding a dental benefit can make folks [on Capitol Hill] very nervous,” Amber Willink, the study’s lead author and assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Galewitz.
Here are some additional questions to ask in your reporting:
- Has an academic institution or government agency in your state or region researched the impact of this problem?
- Does your state have an oral health plan that provides data on the oral health status of seniors?
