The Cost of Delay: State Dental Policies Fail One in Five Children was released 23 February 2010 by The Pew Center on the States (part of The Pew Charitable Trusts). The report was funded by Pew, the DentaQuest Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Pew graded the fifty states and the District of Columbia on eight "key performance indicators" (policy solutions), such as providing dental sealant programs in high-risk schools, "fluoridating community water supplies," improving reimbursement rates for dentists under Medicaid, and "authorizing new primary care dental providers." The results of this study? "Two-thirds of states are doing a poor job," Pew says.
However, six states were graded A: Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Want to find out how your own state did? Fact sheets are available for each state and D.C. See the report's methodology section for data limitations that the researchers encountered.
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I asked Shelly Gehshan, who heads the Pew Children’s Dental Campaign and worked on the report, whether she was optimistic that the passage of the federal health reform legislation will help improve the oral health picture. She told me on 17 May 2010 that the "legislation indeed gives us room for optimism."
Read the full article, "What Philanthropy is Doing to Promote Oral Health Care," at healthaffairs.org.
