{"id":327370,"date":"2021-09-26T17:05:21","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T17:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=0afea4a7300c12ba06373ed0d33955d2"},"modified":"2021-09-26T17:05:21","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T17:05:21","slug":"house-dems-reconciliation-bill-would-add-dental-benefits-to-medicare-in-2028","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/09\/26\/house-dems-reconciliation-bill-would-add-dental-benefits-to-medicare-in-2028\/","title":{"rendered":"House Dems\u2019 Reconciliation Bill Would Add Dental Benefits to Medicare \u2014 in 2028"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Progressives<\/a>

House Democrats’ 2,465-page reconciliation package includes a plan to add dental benefits to Medicare, a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular<\/a> with U.S. voters and \u2014 according to advocates \u2014 urgently needed to assist the tens of millions seniors who have been forced to go without crucial care<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The caveat is that, as currently written, Democrats’ legislation wouldn’t roll out the new dental coverage until 2028, a lag that progressives say is morally unacceptable and politically problematic for the majority party and the White House.<\/p>\n

“This is political malpractice,” Joe Calvello of New Deal Strategies, a progressive consulting firm, said<\/a> in response to the legislative text<\/a> (pdf) released Friday by the House Budget Committee. “Absolutely no excuse for it.”<\/p>\n

As the Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a> earlier this month, federal health officials have warned that “it could take in the range of three to five years to implement new dental benefits” due to numerous factors, including the time-consuming processes of vetting new dentists for the Medicare program and establishing a “new pricing system for reimbursing dentists for the new Medicare procedures and products.”<\/p>\n

“The lengthy timeline threatens to diminish the political upside of the new benefits, which Democrats have seen as an immediate and tangible improvement in voters’ lives they could present to the public in the 2022 and 2024 elections,” the Post<\/em> noted. “One person characterized the prediction of five years as CMS’s ‘worst case scenario’ timeline.”<\/p>\n

Helaine Olen, who serves on the advisory board of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, stressed in a tweet<\/a> on Friday that “seniors desperately want dental benefits.” Roughly two-thirds of Americans over the age of 65 don’t have dental coverage and half haven’t been to the dentist within the past year, according to<\/a> the Kaiser Family Foundation.<\/p>\n

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes on its website<\/a> that nearly one in five U.S. seniors have lost all of their natural teeth.<\/p>\n

“Seniors vote. The White House realizes this,” Olen wrote. “Why, oh, why do so many people consider the Democratic moderates the realists in this equation? Did no one learn anything from the long delay in implementing the [Affordable Care Act]?”<\/p>\n

\n

Looks like House Dem bill includes only starting new Medicare dental benefits in 2028 — way after the White House wants<\/p>\n

WH wants to send new Medicare dental benefits out to millions of seniors as soon as next year, not at the very end of Biden's potential second term pic.twitter.com\/VQXJp3XLnW<\/a><\/p>\n

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) September 24, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n