I found this new study called “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Dental Care for Publicly Insured Children” to be quite discouraging which recently appeared in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs. The study says 25% of children in the state of California (U.S.) have never seen a dentist. It also goes on to address disparities which exist across type of insurance coverage, ethnicity, and race.
This is not good news as lack of dental care can of course cause children to have to miss school for treatment.
The study looks at California kids who are age 11 and under and uses data from the 2005 California Health Interview Survey which contains over 10,000 children. So of course this is slightly dated data that was used.
Some highlights on the study include
- African American and Latino American children with insurance were less likely than Asian American and Caucasian children to have visited the dentist in the previous six months and since they were born.
- African American and Latino American in public insurance programs visited the dentist less often than Asian American and Caucasian children with the same insurance coverage.
- On the whole, children who had private insurance went to the visit more than those with public insurance.
- 54% of privately insured children and 27 % of publicly insured children visited the dentist during the previous six months, where as only 12% of children saw the dentist who had no form of insurance.
As is observed from the above results and the authors comments from the study, public insurance such as Medicaid is limiting due to the lower reimbursement rates for dental services and less number of participating providers.
“The data tell us that Medicaid and CHIP have improved children’s ability to get dental care,” Pourat said of UCLA Center for Health Policy Research said. “However, both programs need to do more to reduce disparities.”