Dental care is health care

Dental issues are no joke — and should be covered under health insurance.

My (relatively minor but annoying) medical woes continue. In the past year and a half, I’ve had covid twice with mild lingering symptoms, a mystery rash on my arms and legs that landed me in the hospital for 5 days, an off-and-on again low- to medium-grade fever for over half a year, a several-day stretch of severe abdominal pain…

And now, I have some sort of dental issue. Apparently in part it’s some kind of infection, since antiobiotics helped a ton, but it’s not only that. I was in what I thought was bad pain for a couple of days, until the pain cranked up to 11. Maybe not quite 11, but I don’t remember the last time I was in that much pain — and I’ve had hernia surgery before. I understand better why people are so afraid of having anything go wrong with their teeth and going to the dentist to have any work done.

The soonest dental appointment — even with them knowing my pain level and symptoms, which I’ll spare you from here — was more than two weeks out, and I contacted several offices. So I did a dental telehealth appointment, which costs 3x as much as a medical one.

I’m fortunately able to afford it, and the dentist did give me antibiotics, which has eliminated almost all of the pain. I can’t imagine if I were still waiting for my in-person dentist appointment with no treatment at all.

But why should a dental telehealth appointment cost more than a “regular” medical appointment? Teeth are in fact part of the body, and in many cases dental issues can cause other health issues. Why don’t many health insurance companies cover dental? I have both medical and dental, separately, but millions of people have medical insurance but not dental.

Someone in the same situation as me, with excruciating tooth pain and apparently an infection, who doesn’t have dental insurance may not have been able to afford telehealth, or may not have had access to telehealth at all. And couldn’t even afford to see a dentist in person, not just a couple weeks down the road but at all.

Medicare For All should be the ultimate goal — healthcare is considered by the UN, and most countries, to be a human right for all. But in the meantime, can we at least agree that people who have medical insurance should also have dental visits and dental work covered?

You have to be a capitalist to think — or to pretend — that your mouth is completely unrelated to health and should not be covered by health insurance. And the industry continues to make billions in profits while people are supposed to grin and bear it, literally, while they needlessly suffer.

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