We were impressed that when put on the spot between inaugural balls today, President Barack Obama was able to outline his plan to give all people in the United States of America the right to a beautiful, healthy smile. The big question is: just who are his dental advisors?

Obama’s Mastication Initiative for America (MIA)

The people of the United States should realize that teeth are a quality of life issue. The government cannot force a citizen to take care of his or her body, nor should a person be penalized for issues that are beyond their control. We have seen the insurance industry take hold of healthcare and overvalue its services. Furthermore, dentists throughout our great nation have resisted the tide of managed medicine and are now capable of not only improving the quality of their patients’ lives, but even the very length of the average American lifespan.

When we look at the technological advances that have been made in dentistry, we know that now is the time for change. It is this administration’s hope that by combining personal responsibility with expert guidance, my Mastication Initiative for America will fulfill the needs of all Americans, not just the ones barely getting by; not just the wealthy, but every one of us.

The details will be forthcoming when I have more than a few breaths of air between dipping my wife on dance floors, but here is a brief outline of the plan:

1. Participation in the plan is voluntary, both for dental providers and for patients.

2. Payments will be made directly to patients on a yearly basis, with the exception of the Lump Sum plan that is described in line 6.

3. All participating dental practices will engage the use of a government-approved method of data gathering and reporting, to be agreed upon in the future, but possibly a special watermarked panoramic digital image that can be submitted to the Department of Health and Human Resources. This will significantly decrease the ability for fraudulent reporting on patient status.

4. Each person under the age of 30 will be required to have yearly dental images submitted on their behalf for reimbursement by the federal government. There will be a fixed amount allowed per person, regardless of actual care rendered. i.e. $500 per year per person under 30. Under no circumstances will any funds be reimbursed if basic preventive measures were not pursued by the patient or their family.

5. Third Molar Extraction will be considered a medical expense, as will any congenital deformity that is currently considered the arena of oral maxillofacial surgeons, so is excluded from the MIA plan.

6. At the age of 30, regardless of previous dental history, all citizens will be eligible for Dental Implant Screening (DIS). Because of the excellent properties of implants versus natural teeth regarding the elimination of the periodontium and thus the link to systemic disease, it is the MIA’s recommendation for DIS to be implemented before dental disease is likely to permanently affect a person’s whole health. Those who are at risk for losing their teeth, who have already lost teeth, or who simply make the choice of not wanting to maintain their teeth will, at this time in their lives, be given the opportunity to have all their teeth removed and have dental implants placed instead. This is a Lump Sum, and will include a preventive appliance to be worn at night. Any person who has implants with DIS will not be able to participate in the MIA after having implants placed.

7. DIS practitioners will work directly for the government, be well-trained, and well-compensated for their expertise.

8. From the age of 30 onward, payments from the MIA will be based on the number of healthy, maintained teeth that a patient displays in the accepted yearly imaging submitted. Included as healthy teeth: those with no restorations, restored teeth with no active defects, teeth with successful root canal therapy, periodontally involved teeth with no bone loss noted within the past year, and dental implants. Teeth that would not be counted for MIA payments: Broken teeth, retained root tips, teeth with active decay, and teeth showing periodontal involvement that has progressed since the previous submitted image.

This is the plan that will ensure that all Americans will be able to smile proudly, whether it is a God-given smile or one granted to them by choice, and no longer will we as a nation be faced with lost work time, emergency room visits, and other troubles caused by bad teeth. After all, this is the very soil where the “Hollywood Smile” was born, and so I ask you to consider what is best for our country, for our children, and for dentistry in the new economy to come.

Hi. I’m a very sad American Indian. I am crying because I just learned that my children have Bisphenol-A in their dental sealants. BPA is bad. It means my boys might end up with man-boobs.

This is about dental pollution, people. It may be ignored by mainstream science, but this problem is real enough to sell newspapers, magazines, and make you read online articles.

What I’ve Heard About Dental Pollution

Everywhere I go I hear about how it’s not fair that the citizens of cities have no choice about the fluoride in their drinking water. Sure, it makes teeth stronger, but there’s a conspiracy of pollution! And it’s the people who are so poor that they can’t even afford cups, they have to tilt their heads sideways to drink under the sink faucet, they are the ones who get the most fluoride in their bodies.

Does fluoride save lives like chlorine does? Wait, I didn’t say that, because it’s going to sound like I am in favor of putting poisons in the water.

You dentists also are protecting the right to fix the holes in people’s mouths with evil substances. If you drill a tooth and put in a silver filling, you have to make the filling soft with toxic mercury. Why can’t you just heat up the silver and pour it in the cavity?

The high road dentists are no better, with their lady-man BPA-leaching plastic composites. I’d rather gnaw on a Nalgene bottle and take my chances with it than have an oil-slick wedged between my teeth 24/7.  The recent petroleum price increases are nothing compared to the cost in human lives.

The other thing that’s polluting our mouths is lead. There’s been lead found in ceramic/metal crowns. They say these crowns come from China. We like to blame everything on China.  But the real reason that there’s lead coming from the dental labs is because the cheap dentists have forced lab technicians to scavenge for scrap metal by secretly dumpster-diving for X-ray film packets.

My shaman tells me that all the metal he sees in people’s mouths is creating imbalance in their meridians. This pollution is caused by all the various metals sending out galvanic currents, which turns our mouths into electrolyte-driven batteries. It scares me even today when I see that trick with the guy who sticks the end of a lightbulb in his mouth and it turns on. I know he’s dying from galvanic currents just for a laugh.

One more pollutant that is caused by the well-meaning but unenlightened dentists of the world is when they leave a dead tooth in a living mouth. Would you leave a cadaver just laying around with living people? Well, this is just what is done when a dentist fills the root canal of a tooth and just leaves the dead shell of a tooth in place.

I’m no Navajo with my sand art, but I sketched out this modern flow chart to help us understand where all this pollution is leading:

The pollutants are circled in red. Only one treatment is circled in green because it doesn’t involve dental pollution.

With only two choices in life if we find that we need a dentist – a polluted mouth or the totally toothless gums of a baby – all we can do is pray to our ancestors to give us naturally strong, healthy teeth.

My life has been one of ignorance until now. I have been going to the dentist regularly, and have had various pollutants placed in my mouth. I still have all of my teeth and have no ill symptoms from the poisons. Should I be grateful, or should I be worried? Are teeth worth it, in the end?

Six Degrees Of Dental Pollution

Here are various tests that you can either do in your office or send home with patients to make sure that you aren’t polluting their mouths:

Fluoride: http://www.hach.com

Bisphenol-A: http://www.biosense.com

Mercury: http://www.heavymetalstest.com/_hgkit.php

Lead: http://www.zefon.com/store/leadcheck-swabs.html

Galvanic Currents: http://www.biomeridian.com/devices.htm

Root Canal Therapy: http://www.holisticdentist.com/articles/root-canal-treatment.html

I know that this isn’t Keep America Beautiful or any other grand public service announcement, but it’s important for dentists to understand the consequences of their actions. And sorry about the waterworks; you know how pollution is a touchy subject for me.

Unbiased reporting about the consumers themselves.

It may be hard to believe, but patients all over the country are complaining that dentists aren’t asking them to pay their bills anymore.

For many years, consumers have taken advantage of dental practices’ good will by just “paying when they could” for their dental care. Unfortunately for many offices, this resulted in the expenses of staff time, mailing repeated statements, and simply writing off debts that were never paid.

Now that healthcare financing has come to the market, Consumer Reports (July 2008 issue) is pointing fingers at CareCredit, the Citi Health Card, Chase HealthAdvance, CapitalOne Healthcare Finance, and the dental providers themselves for allegedly taking advantage of the doctor-patient relationship.

There is no excuse for dentists who purportedly sign patients up for these programs while sedated, or otherwise abuse their patient’s credit for personal gain. Consumer Reports makes it seem like the American Dental Association itself condones this type of behavior. The purpose of healthcare financing is to benefit patients, dentists, and the participating banks. The article even affirms that the lenders take anywhere from 4.5% to 13.9% of the fees that are financed through their credit cards, which is much, much higher than traditional credit cards. Dentists pay these fees in order to give patients access to interest-free payments.

Most patients do pay off their balances within the interest-free period. Those 20 percent who do not were originally the kind that were most likely to show up in the dentists’ accounts-receivable column at the end of the year. Only now it is the banks who have accepted the burden, and because contracts are involved, so are consequences.

Is it really the dental equivalent of subprime mortgages?

Consumer Reports seems to think so. While not exactly an adjustable-rate mortgage, the default retroactive APR of 22.9% when a balance isn’t paid in full after 24 months is not news to anyone who reads the fine print on any typical credit card statement. The only money crisis in healthcare lending is that consumers are now being held accountable for their actions.

It is our culture that breeds the opinion that consumers deserve what they want, exactly when they want it, and it is this belief that is the underpinning of excessive consumer debt. Most patients want a perfect smile, but only the ones who don’t have the self-discipline to know whether or not they can even afford the payments are the ones getting snagged by the banks.

In defense of Consumer Reports, however, it does appear that some of the terms of the loan agreements are difficult to stomach, and it is agreed that some reform here would be beneficial to everyone involved.

Many consumers believe that teeth are more of a luxury than a life-and-death issue. Affirming this is the prosperity of quality dental practices which do not rely on insurance payments for their livelihood. And the bottom-line truth is that edentulism is not a risk factor for any other diseases, so it is not a liability to the overall health of a patient.

Dental insurance is a form of consumer entitlement, and healthcare financing is one strong step away from this dependency and expectation. Insurance justifies the acceptability of mediocre dentistry to the consumer. Perhaps the reality is that every dentist should move towards the model of providing excellent dental care at fees that will keep them in business, without taking advantage of those patients who need much more than just a good set of chompers in their lives.

What’s next?

Our prediction: haircare financing.