Olga Khazan considers why the ACA and most Medicaid plans don’t cover dental care:
The partition between dentistry and the rest of medicine dates back to the dental profession’s roots as an offshoot of hairdressing.
Until the 1800s, barbers served as rudimentary dentists, pulling painful teeth and lancing abscesses after they finished trimming whiskers. In earlier centuries, people would see barbers for occasional bloodletting (thought to be therapeutic at the time)—hence the red-and-white striped pole. If there was a flesh wound, the barber could also play surgeon in a pinch. He, after all, was the one with the sharp knives.
“In the early days of medicine, surgery and medicine were two distinctly different professions,” says Burton Edelstein, a professor of dental medicine and health policy at Columbia University and founder of the Children’s Dental Health Project. “This is before anaesthesia, so surgery was rough. It was not regarded as sophisticated.” …
This minimization of dentistry persisted when Congress was crafting the public health insurance programs in the 1960s. During the original 1965 formulation of Medicaid, the dental market wasn’t very robust and policymakers didn’t value it as highly as other forms of medical care, Edelstein says. In 1960, only 2.3 percent of Americans had some kind of dental insurance.
The Dish 