Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Say no to Tooth-less Health Care Reform
We can't move ahead on dental for the uninsured, if we move backwards on dental for those already covered.
Expansion of children's dental benefits appears likely to pass with all bills in Congress as they begin to get consolidated into a single version and head towards final passage. A great development, to be sure, but at what cost to existing dental benefits? The Senate Finance bill protects current dental benefits while expanding them for children, but the House bills actually threaten to force families with dental benefits today to switch plans for their kids, maintain a separate policy for themselves and their kids, and possibly even lose their current dentist!
More than 97 percent of all dental policies today are sold separately, and are stand-alone dental policies. In the House, HR3200 requires children to obtain dental policies exclusively from their medical carriers, which do not even focus on dental. Don't we want to shop for the best, from the best? And, if we like our current dental plan, aren't we supposed to be able to keep it?
Read more about the changes needed to HR 3200 to protect your family dental plan at Kaiser Health News (KHN is a nonprofit news organization and a major program of the Kaiser Family Foundation) or at California Health Line (a publication of the California Healthcare Foundation).
Contact your representatives today and let them know that the Senate Finance bill got dental right – by allowing kids to enroll or stay enrolled with stand-alone dental plans. The House should do the same. Let's expand children's dental AND protect the family dental plans many of us are fortunate to have today.
Expansion of children's dental benefits appears likely to pass with all bills in Congress as they begin to get consolidated into a single version and head towards final passage. A great development, to be sure, but at what cost to existing dental benefits? The Senate Finance bill protects current dental benefits while expanding them for children, but the House bills actually threaten to force families with dental benefits today to switch plans for their kids, maintain a separate policy for themselves and their kids, and possibly even lose their current dentist!
More than 97 percent of all dental policies today are sold separately, and are stand-alone dental policies. In the House, HR3200 requires children to obtain dental policies exclusively from their medical carriers, which do not even focus on dental. Don't we want to shop for the best, from the best? And, if we like our current dental plan, aren't we supposed to be able to keep it?
Read more about the changes needed to HR 3200 to protect your family dental plan at Kaiser Health News (KHN is a nonprofit news organization and a major program of the Kaiser Family Foundation) or at California Health Line (a publication of the California Healthcare Foundation).
Contact your representatives today and let them know that the Senate Finance bill got dental right – by allowing kids to enroll or stay enrolled with stand-alone dental plans. The House should do the same. Let's expand children's dental AND protect the family dental plans many of us are fortunate to have today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's a bit mind boggling that the House bills would ignore how the market operates today, or ignore the fact that dental is a completely different discipline in both the clinical sense as well as administratively in terms of how claims are processed. In any event, Congress clearly wants to do the right thing with dental. The devil remains in the details.
ReplyDelete