Dentists quit medical card scheme

[TheBear]

From Ireland.com:

• More than one million medical card holders may lose their access to free dental care after dentists voted to withdraw their support for the scheme.
  
  Irish Dental Association (IDA) members voted by 92 per cent to stop co-operating with the Dental Treatment Services Scheme (DTSS), the group said today.
  
  The DTSS was set up by the Government in 1994 and has been due for full renegotiation since 2000. The IDA said the number of dentists offering services under the DTSS had significantly decreased over the past two years and that many of the remaining dentists were curtailing their services on a daily basis.
  
  Dr Maurice Quirke of the IDA said: "The commercial reality is that many dentists can no longer afford to absorb the losses associated with the administration and provision of services under the scheme."

What effect will this have in the long run? Will the dental health of the nation decline as people opt not to have treatment that they can't afford?

Also, how likely is this to become an election issue, given the various other difficulties with the health service faces?

[MarkD]

Not only dental health - dentists can apparently pick up on non-dental medical conditions.

[sackville]

Will the dental health of the nation decline as people opt not to have treatment that they can't afford?

it fast becoming a non-service for more and more, if these are the 'good times' for the country then....

[Libero]

I'm no expert in competition law, but isn't it fairly dodgy that a representative group of one trade or profession is ganging up to blackmail the government to pay them all the same rate for a certain service?

And isn't it a bit of a coincidence that this move comes just before an election and while the exchequer receipts are, for now, doing OK?

Sure, we shouldn't view an essential social health service through economists' eyes alone, but it seems pretty clear to me that the actions of the Irish Dental Association are, at least in spirit if not in law, acting as a providers' cartel to screw the one big buyer of their service (economists call this monopsony).

This is wrong and dangerous for all sorts of reasons that don't need to be explained.

That said, I'd be interested in hearing more about how much dentists receive for patients under this scheme. They should be careful claiming that they can't meet their costs if it's shown they earn lots and lots from the scheme. And no, the private school fees of one's little petals aren't really a fixed cost of dentistry.

On the other hand, maybe the government's trying to be stingy. I don't know. But I'm suspicious of rich professionals using moral blackmail on the national finances just before the election.

[fizz]

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