Truth About Teeth

This is a common scenario in Kansas for those who don’t have dental insurance. Let’s say one of your teeth starts to crumble and you have to go to a dentist. The cost to have a root canal and a crown can run as high $2000. The dentist is going to want his money at the time of service. What will you do if you don’t have the money?

The simplest solution is to perform an extraction to solve the problem. It costs around $200 and the patient while losing the tooth does begin to feel much better because the infection is out of the body. Another alternative would be to visit a local university that has a school of dentistry.

Many dental schools offer reduced-cost services to patients in need. Don’t expect them to foot all the costs for restorative dental work but they can help reduce costs significantly. Even before you start to experience the pain of a toothache the health of your teeth could be giving you problems that impact your overall health.

The Kansas Health Foundation wants to get that information out in a new public-health campaign to address what it calls a crisis in oral health in Kansas. In a campaign called “Truth About Teeth,” the foundation will use words such as “decay” and “gross” plastered across mouths on billboards and in other ads to get people’s attention and give them some fact about the state’s dental condition.

Some interesting facts about dental care in Kansas:

• 58% of Kansas third graders have experienced tooth decay
• Ninety-three counties in Kansas do not have enough dentists to serve their residents, and 13 have no dentists at all.
• Kansas hospitals reported more than 17,500 visits to emergency rooms for dental-related problems in 2010.
• Kansas ranks 18th in the United States for total tooth loss among senior citizens.
• Only 25 percent of Kansas dentists accept patients insured through Medicaid.