Need work done on your teeth, but for free? UMKC dental school is looking for you
The School of Dentistry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City needs a few good — or not so good — mouths.
Seniors at the school need patients for their clinical exams in March, preferably people who may not have been to the dentist in a while.
The school will host free screenings for potential patients Saturday. Anyone chosen to participate will get their teeth worked on next month, also for free.
More than 300 people showed up to be screened last year and it’s a wonder that number wasn’t 10 times larger. Because when it comes to their teeth, many American adults — old and poor in particular — are suffering physical and financial pain.
“People without insurance, people in poverty, just have to work so much harder than anybody else to figure out how to get any kind of dental or health care,” said Tanya Dorf Brunner, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group, Oral Health Kansas, in Topeka.
“It falls down on the list of priorities … just keeping food on the table and the electricity paid is a much bigger priority.”
Many older Americans can’t get appropriate dental work done because Medicare doesn’t cover routine care.
Because they don’t go to the dentist, more than 40 percent of Americans have felt pain in their mouth in the last year and one in four is walking around with untreated cavities, federal data says.
Fear, cost and “inability to find a convenient location or appointment time,” are the top reasons adults give for not going to the dentist, according to the American Dental Association. Fifty-nine percent said cost was the biggest reason.
Connie White, associate dean for clinical programs at UMKC’s dentistry school, sees those problems first-hand at the school’s clinic.
Last year, White said, the clinic saw 65,000 patients who paid reduced fees — one third to half the cost of a private dentist, according to the school — for fillings, implants, crowns and the like.
The patients come from across the metro area and from both sides of the state line, from as far away as Wichita, Kansas, and the Ozarks in Missouri, said White. Rural America continues to face an oral health crisis, dubbed one of its “greatest unmet needs” by one government committee in 2018.
The government estimates that about 34 million Americans in rural areas don’t have easy access to a dentist, which is why a handful of states, Missouri included, have turned to the high-tech, remote services of teledentistry.
“I think the majority of our patients are working poor. They are people who really are sort of in the middle,” said White. “They are working but they’re working jobs that just do not afford them dental insurance, and the cost of dental care is just out of their range.
“They are people that work at jobs that do not provide a high reimbursement rate, and they’re just working from check to check. Many of them have to save for quite a while in order to have some procedure taken care of. It is a need in our community.”
‘So much pain’
To make legislators sit up and feel their constituents’ pain, Oral Health Kansas is collecting stories from Kansans who are suffering because of their teeth.
This is one story from an unidentified Kansas City resident, as submitted.
“I have had bad teeth all my life, i have pulled 2 wisdom teeth on my own, cause i cant afford to go the dentist i’ve try to get help, but no one will help me, my teeth are falling one by one, i’ve been in so much pain, still am, i can barley eat, i cant brush my teeth cause they hurt so bad, i constantly have a tooth ach, most of the time i taste poison in my mouth, i do my best to spit it out ...
“ im scared my teeth are gonna be the death of me, i’ve been so depressed, i don’t smile i try not to talk to anybody.”
This legislative session, Oral Health Kansas is trying to secure a hearing for Senate Bill 349, which it says will go a long way to filling in “several gaps” in access to dental healthcare in the state.
The Kansas Oral Health Improvement Act calls for a statewide oral health plan. It would also increase Medicaid dental reimbursement rates and offer dental benefits to recipients of KanCare, the program that administers Medicaid in Kansas.
“There is no dental benefit in the Medicare program, and in Kansas there is no dental benefit for adults in Medicaid,” said Brunner, the group’s executive director. “Missouri does have a benefit, but Kansas doesn’t.”
But securing dental insurance for Kansans on Medicaid won’t solve the problem of dental care access “if the rates are too low that dentists don’t want to provide the services,” Brunner said.
The Star reported last year that less than one-third of the dentists in Kansas take Medicaid because the reimbursements only amount to about 35 percent of what they charge.
“We’re trying so hard to talk to legislators and make the case that folks who are in this kind of gap can’t smile, can’t get a job, can’t be healthy if they’re on Medicaid,” said Brunner.
“I talked to a guy a couple of years ago, who said he’d broken his denture and he was trying to glue it together but couldn’t keep it glued and he was having trouble eating.
“And it turned out he also had diabetes, which meant he couldn’t eat healthy fruits and vegetables because he couldn’t chew, and it’s just heart-breaking. So we just keep trying to tell the stories.”
More than a ‘standard cleaning’
On its website, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services keeps a list of places Americans can find low-cost dental care, suggesting federally-funded community health centers and dental schools like UMKC’s.
This is about the ninth year UMKC has invited people to be screened for participation in the student exams, White said. The students’ work will be supervised, as it always is, by faculty members who are licensed dentists, she said.
Students have performed the procedures dozens of times by now in their schooling, UMKC says.
The school is looking for patients who need work more involved than “a standard cleaning,” she said.
“It’s been a huge success because patients find out about us, they come in, and even if they’re not accepted for the exam, we get them screened for full care and they really start to understand the culture of our school,” said White.
Faculty and staff members have volunteered to help with the screenings, which begin at 8 a.m. Saturday at the dental school, located near Children’s Mercy, at 650 E. 25th St. People should call 816-200-7381 to make an appointment, though walk-ins will be taken, too.
The X-rays are free. If people are chosen to participate they will return to the school between March 26 and 29 for the dental work, which is also free.
Besides the Saturday screenings, dental hygiene students will host by-appointment free screenings in March that could lead to patients getting free deep cleanings of their gums.
“I always liken it to driving a car,” said White. “All of us can read a manual about how to drive a car and pass a written test. But you would never ever consider going into a driver license bureau and taking a driving test without having gotten behind the wheel. Because you just can’t learn how to drive a car unless you’ve driven a car.
“The same is true in dentistry. You can do all of the pre-clinical things that you want to do in teaching someone to be a dentist. But until they have been in the operator’s position and they actually treat patients, that’s how they learn dentistry.
“It’s invaluable for our students, and we can’t do it it without our patients.”
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