Is It Finally Time for a Medicare Dental Benefit?

Abstract

In 1958, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and several other health professional organizations created the Joint Council to Improve the Health Care of the Aged, which was dedicated to opposing the creation of the program that would eventually become Medicare. In the years since the council’s defeat, Medicare has proved transformative, with enrollment in the program at 65 years of age resulting in improved access to care and reductions in health-related racial inequities.¹ Yet organized medicine and dentistry’s historical opposition to Medicare has at least one present-day legacy: with the exception of some Medicare Advantage plans, Medicare still lacks dental coverage.