Ohio kids on Medicaid have trouble finding dentists

The Toledo Blade published an article on Sunday detailing the shortage of dentists in northwest Ohio who will accept children who are on Medicaid. (Source: "A gap that needs to be filled: Dentists for Medicaid kids" Toledo Blade, Jan. 20, 2008.) "Low reimbursement rates are chief among the reasons why dentists don't routinely accept disabled or poor children covered by Medicaid. Programs in Ohio, for example, pay about 51 cents on the dollar." According to Dr. Paul Casamassimo, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, "A lot of dentists can't afford to take Medicaid. It costs them money to take care of the kids." This lack of care results in dentists who do treat Medicaid recipients seeing "emergency cases where children have infections from abscessed teeth because they don't get routine dental care. In rare cases, such infections--as with a 12-year-old Maryland boy last year who had no dental insurance at all--are fatal."

Despite this, statistics show that the move to Medicaid managed-care programs in recent years in Ohio has helped increase the percentage of children seeing dentists. "Ohio, for example, has had a 20% hike in the number of Medicaid-covered children getting help over the last five years, with about half of those aged 4 to 21 having a dental visit in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services."