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A mouthful
Oct. 7th, 2004 02:52 amOK, so socialized medicine isn't going to fly politically in the United States, and even some sort of national health insurance seems difficult to achieve.
How about stepping back a bit and taking this piecemeal? Specifically, how about a national dental insurance plan?
The reason I've been thinking about this is obvious. I've had a lot of work done recently whose necessity was my own stupid fault for not going to the dentist for years, even though I've had a decent dental plan since 1997. But I actually fell out of the habit while I was a graduate student—I went to my old dentist in Virginia once or twice during those years, but I never bothered to find a new dentist in the Boston area, in part because I had no dental insurance then.
(Once I had the coverage, I'd been away for long enough that I got into that weird cycle of shame in which I put off things I've already put off in order to avoid confronting the fact that I've put them off.)
Anyway, starting with dental care would have a number of advantages:
1. I suspect that the number of Americans with no dental insurance vastly exceeds the number with no health coverage at all, and includes more people who consider themselves middle-class. So there's a larger potential base of political support.
2. It would cover students. It seems as if a lot of young people are like me, and visit the dentist regularly until they go off to college, and at some point in their academic careers lose all their dental insurance for years until they get fancy jobs (if they even get it back then). In a society in which more and more people go to college and many go on to advanced degrees, this seems like a major omission.
3. While most aspects of human health benefit from preventive measures, dental health is perhaps the most extreme case of this (next to vaccination); teeth really need a lot of maintenance if you don't want to lose them all by middle age, but the preventive measures are pretty cheap and don't even involve difficult lifestyle changes. And, of course, really bad teeth can lead to systemic infections and such. Just paying for people to go to the dentist twice a year, get cleaned and checked out, and get the odd cavity filled would yield an enormous payoff.
For some reason, dental coverage seems to be considered a more optional item today than general health insurance. But we might be getting this backwards.
How about stepping back a bit and taking this piecemeal? Specifically, how about a national dental insurance plan?
The reason I've been thinking about this is obvious. I've had a lot of work done recently whose necessity was my own stupid fault for not going to the dentist for years, even though I've had a decent dental plan since 1997. But I actually fell out of the habit while I was a graduate student—I went to my old dentist in Virginia once or twice during those years, but I never bothered to find a new dentist in the Boston area, in part because I had no dental insurance then.
(Once I had the coverage, I'd been away for long enough that I got into that weird cycle of shame in which I put off things I've already put off in order to avoid confronting the fact that I've put them off.)
Anyway, starting with dental care would have a number of advantages:
1. I suspect that the number of Americans with no dental insurance vastly exceeds the number with no health coverage at all, and includes more people who consider themselves middle-class. So there's a larger potential base of political support.
2. It would cover students. It seems as if a lot of young people are like me, and visit the dentist regularly until they go off to college, and at some point in their academic careers lose all their dental insurance for years until they get fancy jobs (if they even get it back then). In a society in which more and more people go to college and many go on to advanced degrees, this seems like a major omission.
3. While most aspects of human health benefit from preventive measures, dental health is perhaps the most extreme case of this (next to vaccination); teeth really need a lot of maintenance if you don't want to lose them all by middle age, but the preventive measures are pretty cheap and don't even involve difficult lifestyle changes. And, of course, really bad teeth can lead to systemic infections and such. Just paying for people to go to the dentist twice a year, get cleaned and checked out, and get the odd cavity filled would yield an enormous payoff.
For some reason, dental coverage seems to be considered a more optional item today than general health insurance. But we might be getting this backwards.