In response to Dr. Maureen Murphy’s January JADA letter to the editor regarding the lack of dentists willing to see Medicaid patients in North Carolina, I can only tell her what the situation is here in Illinois.
While physicians receive 70 percent to 75 percent of their average fees to provide care to patients on Medicaid, dentists in Illinois receive about 50 percent of their fees to treat the same patients. With overhead costs running about 65 percent of fees, the difficulty in finding dentists willing to treat these patients is seen.
Dr. Murphy, rather than cursing the darkness, light a candle! Join with your colleagues in the North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians and inform your legislators that you, as a trained medical provider, think the treatment of oral and dental disease is important enough for the state to adequately reimburse those who can properly treat these diseases. Most of the time the general medical community does not take dental disease seriously, and so government does likewise.
Case in point: Two universities in Chicago (Northwestern and Loyola) closed their more than 100-year-old, world-class dental schools without a whisper of protest from any medical or government group. Only the dental community took issue with the closings.
I very much welcome the fact that you and your organization recognize that proper dental treatment is necessary for the overall good health of the individual. Together, we must enlighten the government powers that control the funds necessary to do the job.
