Study: Not all Virginians receive adequate dental care

Dental health across the U.S. has improved steadily in recent years, and most Virginians receive more frequent preventive care than the national average. But some segments of Virginia's population have clearly been left behind in access to dental care, according to a study by two University of Virginia economists.

Significant disparities exist in Virginians' dental health across race, income, and regions of the state, Terance Rephann of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service and Tanya Wanchek of the School of Medicine wrote in the Virginia News Letter (August 2012).

The greatest barrier to dental care is financial, the authors found. Low-income residents without insurance or with low-cost public care are least likely to visit a dentist. African-Americans in Virginia are less likely than other groups to have visited a dentist or dental clinic in the past year. And Virginians in the highly urbanized northern and eastern regions of the state are more likely to have received dental care than residents of the more rural western and southern regions.

Other study findings include the following:

• With about 62 dentists per 100,000 residents in 2010, Virginia is slightly below the national average. Four rural counties with relatively high percentages of African-Americans have no dentists at all: Charles City County, King and Queen County, Surry County, and Sussex County.

• The federal government designates 84 areas of Virginia, including 45 counties and cities, as dental health professional shortage areas, where the population has an insufficient number of dentists to serve its needs. Approximately 15.6% of the state's population lives in those areas, mostly in Virginia's western and southern regions.

• For uninsured patients, hospital emergency rooms are the only regularly available recourse for painful oral infections and trauma -- though the services offered are generally restricted to prescribing antibiotics and painkillers and a referral to a dentist for care.

• Virginia offers very limited dental services to low-income adults for two reasons: the state Medicaid eligibility rules for adults are fairly stringent, excluding some who would be covered in other states, and Medicaid-eligible adults are generally offered only emergency services.

• Virginia has the sixth-highest rate of fluoridation of public water systems in the nation, a major factor in preventing tooth decay. In 2010, more than 95% of the population on public water supply systems received fluoridated water, compared with about 74% nationwide.