medicaid

Dental Care in Exchange for Community Service

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Interesting work out of the University of Michigan discusses the concept of getting dental care for free by performing community service. A master’s thesis by Lorene R. Kline titled “No Cost Dental Care in Exchange for Community Service Hours: Participating Patients’ and Dentists’ Responses” (2016) discusses this concept. The article is located over at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/123017/Kline_MSDH_Thesis_%20Final_2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y The work discusses a program to help low income Michigan residents where adult participants were offered $25 in dental services for every hour of volunteer work. The program was titled Pay it Forward and was a partnership between Care Free Medical and Dental and the Central District Dental Society of Michigan. Pay It Forward was geared toward low-income adults who fell between 133% and 250%  of the poverty level and did not qualify for Medicaid. The cost was based on Medicaid schedule fees. The thesis work focused on … Read more

Senate Report Calls for Removing Deceptive Corporate Dentistry Entities From Medicaid

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Previously I have written an article titled Fraud and Abuse in Medicaid Clinics where a discussion was made that currently dentists have large amounts of debt when they graduate from school. This leads to them having to face potentially hard and difficult choices to pay their bills as they essentially become indentured servants. Recently Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Max Baucus (D-MT) published a 1517 page report in June 2013, titled “JOINT STAFF REPORT ON THE CORPORATE PRACTICE OF DENTISTRY IN THE MEDICAID PROGRAM.” This report is a very large PDF file (143 MB) and is available for download over at http://www.finance.senate.gov/library/prints/.  Don’t be intimidated by the size of the report though as it really is a bit over 30 pages with the rest of the 1400+ pages serving as an appendix. Hence, it is very readable. The report talks … Read more

Fraud and Abuse in Medicaid Clinics

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I have previously discussed on this blog how students graduating from medical school have an average debt of around $158,000 and the average debt of those graduating from undergraduate college is around $27,000 in the U.S.  In fact, the video called College Conspiracy https://blog.teethremoval.com/college-conspiracy-and-united-states-hyperinflation/ profiles a dentist who is stuck with with high loans from school  (around the 11 minute mark). One quote appearing in this video is “…as soon as you get out of school you are indentured for life.” This figure below showing the inflation cost of college tuition (in blue), medical care (in red), and general inflation (in black) from http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/College.html pretty much tells more of the story. In fact I would argue that college tuition costs and medical costs are correlated with each other and you should be able to calculate some sort of correlation coefficient. An interesting article titled “Our Junior Colleagues … Read more