Upcoming Series on the Impact of Oral Health on Major Health Conditions

Beginning with next week’s Alert, the Center will feature a series of factsheets that explain in layperson’s terms the interrelationship between oral health and major medical conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Each factsheet will offer important oral health tips for persons living with these medical conditions, as well as their caregivers, advocates, and health care providers. While individual prevention and management of oral and dental disease are important in the context of certain underlying health problems, access to affordable dental coverage and care can be absolutely vital as well. This latter component is one that too many Medicare beneficiaries currently lack. We hope these factsheets will serve to illustrate why the meaning of health care needs to include oral health care, and why oral health benefits should be added to Medicare.

The factsheets are developed in collaboration with Larry Coffee, DDS, the esteemed dentist who founded the Dental Lifeline Network, a national nonprofit organization that provides critical dental therapies to needy disabled, elderly, and medically fragile individuals through volunteer dentists.  Like the Center’s advocates, Dr. Coffee has long been a champion for expanding dental coverage in Medicare, having witnessed the profound challenges faced by people who require but cannot afford medically-essential, and sometimes life-sustaining, oral health care.