Even With Insurance, Dental Care Is A Waiting Game

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday February 16, 2005

The way health insurance companies handle dental care may contribute to the dental care decline. I'm paying about $1200 a year for my health insurance, more than my motorbike and house insurance put together, and yet I cannot claim the whole of my health care. You get pointless little refunds like "up to 80 per cent of the value but only to the limit of $650". Too bad the crown that I need for my teeth is $1500 and I have got quotes from two dentists. So where did the insurance agency come up with the magic $650 limit?

Did I mention that I can only get one crown a year? Too bad that I need three. Why doesn't health insurance work like other insurance where you take out the insurance to cover all your expenses?

Rod Sherwin Turner (ACT)

The appalling state of public dental services in NSW ("Dental crisis exposes great divide", Herald, February 15) underlines another triple Z performance in service provision by a state government obsessed with its triple A credit rating. And it shows just how callous the Howard Government can be when it comes to an essential service like dental health.

Perhaps the most telling statistic your article reveals is that wealthier people receive much more in public subsidies for dental treatment than those on low incomes.

Dentists in private practice have never had it so good. Surely it is time for dental services to be covered under Medicare. Why should Australians from lower socio-economic groups endure much poorer oral health, alongside greater levels of diabetes, chronic respiratory problems and mental illness?

Gary Moore Director, Council of

Social Service of NSW, Surry Hills

So let me get this straight. We can afford hundreds of millions to create and sustain detention camps, here and on offshore islands, to incarcerate hapless refugees, hundreds of millions more to send troops half the way round the world to assist in the slaughter of Iraqis with whom we have no quarrel, tens of millions on staging the Commonwealth Games, millions more on politicians' overseas jaunts with their latest squeeze, but we can't afford to cut the waiting lists in hospital for children under four with dental caries that causes them intense pain just by breathing.

What a disgusting lot we have become.

Les MacDonald Balmain

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here. Just like with the rest of the health system, the Federal Government is doing all it can to make private care more attractive by eroding the public systems and leaving people to languish on enormous waiting lists. And no, this catastrophe was not the Carr Government's doing.

Let's not forget who pulled the funding out in the first place - it was the Howard Government that decided that only rich people need their teeth.

Shannon Brown North Ryde

It is often said the health of a society is measured by the way it looks after its citizens who live at its margins.

Given the recent reports on the appalling underresourcing of public dental health in NSW, as well as the equally sickening underfunding of mental health services, NSW is a very sick society indeed.

And lest we want to lay blame just at the feet of the Premier, Bob Carr, we should also remember that it was the federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, who cut the Commonwealth dental health program in January 1997.

No doubt, as always, the states and the feds will buck-pass responsibility. Sadly, as always, our disadvantaged carry the can.

Meanwhile, as our politicians smile for the cameras, we can also remember that they can afford their private dentists.

Richard Makarewicz Lennox Head

In its first term the Coalition boasted of its ability to turn Labor's deficit into a surplus. The feat was achieved through a razor gang which, among other things, cut federal funding for dental programs.

Your report on increasing dental inequality makes it clear exactly who ended up paying for Peter Costello's glorious surplus.

Ben Spies-Butcher Darlington

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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