policy

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Lexington Herald Leader

FRANKFORT – The oral health of Kentucky’s school children is worsening, even though more of them are covered by dental insurance today than 15 years ago.

A new report was presented Wednesday to the state’s legislature’s Interim Health and Welfare Committee, following on an earlier statewide study conducted in 2001. The report’s authors found that 41 percent of third- and sixth-graders surveyed by a dentist had at least one untreated cavity. In Eastern Kentucky, that figure rose to 53 percent, amounting to about 15,100 children in immediate need of a filling.

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DiagnosticImaging.com – Editor’s Corner

I recently sought to find a new primary-care physician ‘who’s located closer to where my wife and I live.

It ended up being a lot harder than I thought. Either doctors don’t take our insurance, aren’t taking new patients, or just don’t have 15 minutes to spare in the next few months.

The primary-care physician shortage is real, people. I am sure you didn’t need me to tell you that, but it’s interesting to experience firsthand an issue that we seem to talk about every day.

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Health Affairs Blog

For several decades, there has been a general consensus that the nation would benefit from an increased supply of primary care practitioners, including physicians. Most reform efforts to improve health care, including the Affordable Care Act (ACA), have viewed an increased focus on primary care as essential for improving the delivery system and outcomes of care. According to the Center for Health Workforce Studies (CHWS) demand index, these efforts are beginning to pay off.

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Kentucky Center for Economic Policy

The proposed changes to Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion include the elimination of dental coverage from the package of benefits for adults. Reducing access to dental care would likely lead to other, more serious health problems and cost the state more in overall Medicaid spending through greater use of emergency room services. Dental care makes up a small portion of the overall budget, but is a very efficient preventative medical service that is critical in Kentucky given our poor oral health.

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The Pew Charitable Trusts

Poor dental health continues to be a problem throughout Kentucky, but the situation is particularly severe for low-income residents, people living in rural areas, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with special needs, according to a report released on Feb. 24 2016 by the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University at Albany.

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PBS Kentucky Educational Television

As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets changed. While the oral health status of Kentuckians is widely acknowledged as needing improvement, the hard numbers to support this claim have not been aggregated and presented to the public in a comprehensive way – until now.

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Kentucky Health News

More Kentuckians than ever have access to dental care because of Medicaid eligibility for dental insurance, and the state has made some gains in oral health, but finding a dentist can still be a problem, especially in rural Kentucky. And even though children on Medicaid have dental insurance, more than half of them don’t get any dental care.

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