Is it safe? Not sure how it relates to this, but the movie sprang to mind when I heard via Boots and Sabers Wisconsin's Senator Russ Feingold is pushing for federal funding of dentistry in "rural and underserved" areas. Maybe I remembered Marathon Man's famous dentist/torture scene which is similar to my federal tax bill every year.
I've had on and off dental insurance, depending on need and how much I'm getting charged by the insurance company. My dentist is very old school about such things and always told me we'd "work it out" if something ever came up. (Of course, I could always take advantage of a Medical Savings Account if they didn't expire at the end of the year.) But something he and I discussed recently has stuck with me and is an example of price affecting demand.
We were discussing cosmetic dentistry, and how necessary dentistry has been defined down. Why? Because with dental insurance, few patients actually bear any of the real cost of the cosmetic dentistry. And I'm not talking about braces. I'm talking about the laser whitening, etc. We've all seen the commercials. So more people are demanding these services and the insurance companies are paying for it. So more dentists are going into that line of work, basically inventing a demand for their services.
Fine, I have no issue with that. But what it masks is that there is actually a surplus of dentists for the amount of real dental work. With fluoridation, there's less cavities, with insurance, real problems are caught and solved earlier, etc. So there's less of a need for dentists, especially in urban areas. Soon dental clinics will be as ubiquitous as opticians.
So where will the real need for real dentistry be? In rural areas, maybe? And maybe dentists looking to do real work will move out to meet this unmet demand? Sounds like the marketplace doesn't exactly need a federal subsidy for dentists.
