Dear Editor:
August is Oral Health Awareness Month. This is an especially important time for each Missourian to stop and think about oral health - your own, your family members' and your community's.
Too many of us consider oral health to be an extra, add-on issue that can be left for later. But leaving oral health for later is a bad deal. We cannot be truly healthy without also having good oral health. And if we have other health challenges to manage - heart disease and diabetes, for example - having good oral health will make managing those conditions easier. We gain from having good oral health, personally and as a community.
This year the Legislature and governor re-established dental benefits for adults eligible for MO HealthNet (Medicaid). This means for the first time since 2004 Medicaid-eligible adults have coverage for preventive and treatment dental services. This will save us all money.
Missouri has an ongoing trend of people who have no access to routine dental care showing up in emergency rooms when the pain becomes unbearable. ERs are not equipped to provide dental care, so people are given pain killers and antibiotics, while the underlying dental condition remains untreated, almost guaranteeing a return ER trip and fostering dependence on pain killers.
In the future we look forward to seeing a drop in ER usage, a drop in pain from untreated dental conditions and the savings on health care costs that this sensible and prudent policy change will produce.
This August, think about oral health and thank the Missouri legislators and Gov. Nixon for setting Missouri oral health policy on the right track.