More Americans Heading to E.R. For Dental Care - at 10 times the cost of dentist's office
More Americans Heading to E.R. For Dental Care
If you developed a seriously painful toothache, would you head to the emergency room to get it taken care of?
In an ideal world, probably not. But lacking access to regular care from a dentist, an estimated 830,590 Americans sought help for their dental ailments in the E.R. in 2009, according to a report released yesterday from the Pew Center on the States.
That represents a 16% increase from 2006, according to the report, which pulled information on E.R. visits from a database maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (The estimate is based on an analysis of hospital codes from a weighted sample of 29 million E.R. visits to nearly 1,000 hospitals, Pew says.)
So why do people end up in the E.R. for problems that often could have been nipped in the bud through regular checkups, cleanings and fillings? Barriers to accessing care, Pew says. Last year an Institute of Medicine report estimated that a third of the population has difficulty getting dental care.
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But shifting dental care to E.R.s is expensive, particularly when problems that would have been easily and cheaply fixed with routine dental visits get bad enough to require surgery and general anesthesia. “Research shows the average costs of a Medicaid enrollee’s inpatient hospital treatment for dental problems is nearly 10 times more expensive than the cost of preventive delivered in a dentist’s office,” the report says.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2012/02/29/more-americans-heading-to-e-r-for-dental-care-report/?mod=google_news_blog
