Governor Won't Restore Dental Benefits For Low-Income Ohioans

Source: AP

POSTED: 11:10 am EST November 20, 2007
UPDATED: 11:35 am EST November 20, 2007

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The Strickland administration has backed out of plans to restore dental benefits for 700,000 low-income Ohioans and to boost Medicaid payments to hospitals and doctors who care for the poor.

Higher than expected caseloads in the program, which provides state and federal dollars to insure the poor, made it impossible for the state to afford the $65 million a year that expanded benefits would have cost, Keith Dailey, a spokesman for Gov. Ted Strickland, said Monday.

"The governor is committed to moving forward in a fiscally responsible way," Dailey said. He noted that the administration will get new numbers in mid-December that may change the outlook.

The decision came less than a day before a hearing scheduled Tuesday to consider the expansion, which would have reversed cuts the state made in 2005.

The two-year state operating budget that went into effect July 1 called for restoring dental benefits, which had been cut by lawmakers in 2005, beginning Jan. 1. It also called for a 3.2 percent increase in Medicaid rates to hospitals and a 3 percent increase for doctors and other non-hospital providers.

Representatives of the physicians and dentist associations were outraged, saying they feared providers will now drop out of Medicaid as a result, leaving poor Ohioans without needed services.

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Cleaning up his mess will take many, many years.

need it is just insane. He needs to remove money from somewhere where it's less NEEDED than health. I don't understand that kind of thinking, sacrificing the health of people so as not to remove money from elsewhere as it might piss off business.

It's nearly impossible to find an office that will even accept the state insurance to begin with. I know people who've called every office that claims to accept it only to be denied to all of them due to the insurance's poor repayment records. The result is most people on state insurance use the ER as their regular physician anyways so this really won't affect much in those terms. He should really be trying to straighten the whole thing out rather than shut it down though.

Medicaid is not an insurance program it is a state funded service.

Here in Ohio medicaid has recently been turned over to a small number of private insurance companies. A small shady group of insurers that you have to select from, most of which are so bad about their payment policy that health care providers started refusing to accept them. As for the ER providing dental care, most hospitals do retain a dental surgeon on staff. With most medicaid recipients have such a hard time finding proper regular dental health care the situation typically results in extraction rather than fillings or root canals and the like.