Some children from low-income families could lose dental care under a provincial plan, critics are warning.Zsolt Bota Finna - FotoliaThousands of poor kids won’t get their teeth cleaned and cared for after the provincial government combines a mess of programs that are supposed to help them, health units across Ontario are warning.Ottawa’s health board joined the list of those sounding the alarm with a letter to Health Minister Eric Hoskins. “The impact on a child and its family will not only be financial but will also have a severe impact on a child’s health and well-being,” the letter says.Teeth aren’t covered by provincial health insurance, though there’s general acknowledgment that they’re connected to the rest of our bodies. Minor dental problems turn into major medical ones if they aren’t treated. A cavity that could be solved with a filling can become an abscess that needs surgery under general anesthesia, covered by public insurance.Bad teeth can also perpetuate poverty: It’s hard to make a good impression on a potential employer if your mouth is a mess. The damage can start long before any kid is old enough to take any responsibility for his or her own situation.So we do have public programs to help. A lot of them, funded by different ministries.There’s one for the children of people on welfare, another for the kids of people on disability supports. Another for children who are themselves severely disabled. Public-health units run programs in schools to reach kids whose parents don’t take them to dentists. The list goes on.The intent now is to consolidate everything into one program that will have one set of qualifying standards, starting next August. Meet them and you’ll get a benefits card from the government, much like a health card but for teeth.“It allows you to go see a dentist with it. On the surface, it is probably what you’d say is a logical approach to consolidating the programs and the payments,” says Aaron Burry, the city’s general manager of social services. He’s in charge of programs from housing to welfare, and he also happens to be a dentist who works part-time at a practice in Kanata.He worries about two things in the province’s plans. First, a program that pays for kids’ dental care based on both their families’ financial means and their dental needs is part of the merger. As a result, the threshold for those who qualify for public help will change. That means some parents will no longer be considered poor enough to receive assistance.“If you look at the person who’s most likely to be caught in the middle, it’s going to be a family that’s above the (income) threshold. Two working parents who don’t have jobs that come with benefits, they’re going to have a child who has a lot of dental needs, and they’re not going to be able to cover the costs,” Burry says.There are about 1,000 children in that zone in Ottawa now. They’re like 3,900 kids in northwestern Ontario, 1,500 in the counties east of Ottawa, 400 in Windsor — all of whose public-health units have written to the government saying this is going to be a problem.The provincial government has now promised that nobody currently getting benefits will actually be cut off. There’ll just be kids out there who won’t start getting them.The other, bigger concern for Burry is that there won’t be money for the bigger-picture work Ontario’s local health units do to promote dental health. Not scaling and flossing and filling, but teaching brushing technique in health class and encouraging fruit snacks instead of sweets.“I can do so much seeing someone twice a year,” Burry says of his own work as a dentist. “I can’t do anything like as much as a daycare that changes the menu.”This work also helps kids whose parents can’t be counted on to handle their dental care, even if somebody else is paying for it.There is time to fix things before the changes kick in next summer. The province says it’s working on it, emphasizing that the point is to make getting treatment easier and to free up money now used for administering different programs. “The integration of these programs will provide seamless enrolment and make it easier for eligible children and youth to receive the dental care they need, regardless of their family’s social assistance status,” says a statement from provincial Social Services Minister Helena Jaczek.
Poor kids would lose dental services under provincial plan
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