Holes In Our Dental Care
Newcastle Herald
Tuesday January 2, 2007
Holes in our dental care
RAYMOND Terrace dentist Chris Wilson is to be congratulated for speaking out about the major problems with government-funded dental care.Dr Wilson, a recent NSW president of the Australian Dental Association, says someone needing two teeth pulled and replaced with dentures is facing a wait of up to five years.He is calling for a dramatic increase in government funding, and extra effort to boost the Hunter's below-average number of dentists, but there is a case to say that the entire process of dental funding should be reviewed and overhauled, rather than continue with a system that continues to fail despite various attempts to tinker with it. A Commonwealth Dental Health Care Program was introduced by the Keating government in 1993 and abolished by the Howard Government in 1997, leaving the states to cope, as they had for decades before, with the burden of public dental care. NSW is not the only state to see its hospital dental services decline in the meantime, to the point where only the most impoverished people endure the often painful wait for treatment. Federal health funding under Medicare is open-ended: there is no limit to the number of times a person can visit a doctor, and Medicare will even subsidise the cost of complementary treatments including acupuncture, despite continuing scientific doubt about their worth. Yet Medicare will pay rebates for only three dental visits a year, and then only to a small number of people with "a chronic condition and complex care needs being managed by their GP".Dentistry is not cheap, and federal policies encouraging private health insurance have seen many people take out optional dental cover to ease the hip-pocket burden. People without private insurance have no such luxury, yet these are the people being failed by a lack of political will to help the hospital dental system. The State Government points to a budget increase of $40 million over four years for public dentistry, but this is a drop in the ocean beside the $40 billion a year that Canberra spends on Medicare and pharmaceutical subsidies.Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd is addressing a clear-cut need when he says the Commonwealth scheme should be reintroduced. A simpler, and perhaps more cost-effective change, might be to add mainstream dentistry to Medicare. Saddam Hussein SO much has gone horribly wrong in the US-led invasion of Iraq that the hanging of the once-feared Saddam Hussein is seen as just another sorry chapter in the chaotic history of the Middle East. President George Bush used to say that chasing Saddam was "personal", but there was no crowing from the US Administration at the weekend.Saddam's execution will do little to end the Iraq crisis.More than 3000 US soldiers have died since the invasion, with the Iraqi death toll estimated at 150,000 or more. Sadly, the killing looks far from over.
© 2007 Newcastle Herald