While far fewer Americans have dental coverage than have health insurance, a Delta Dental survey finds the amount of time people miss from work due to dental problems is on the way down.
While in 2015, 28 percent of respondent adults indicated they'd missed work due to oral health issues, the survey finds, that went down by a full seven percentage points in 2016 to 21 percent.
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Interestingly, men miss more time from work due to such issues as toothaches and pain, with 25 percent saying they miss work days because of oral health problems, compared with just 17 percent of women. Still, both sexes are missing fewer work days than they did in 2015, when 29 percent of men and 26 percent of women reported that they took off work for a dental problem.
Among age groups, millennials log the most out-of-office time for dental woes, but even they seem to be doing better. In 2015, 40 percent of millennials reported missing work days thanks to oral health problems, while that dropped to 33 percent in 2016.
Of course, there's still room for improvement. The most recently available statistics (2015) from the Centers for Disease Control indicate that the percentage of adults aged 18–64 who actually had a dental visit in the past year only amounted to 62.0 percent. And the National Association of Dental Plans reports that at year-end 2016, only about 66 percent of the population, approximately 211.7 million Americans, had dental benefits.
That leaves a lot of people who aren't making it to the dentist — and probably explains why there are still so many people who had to leave work to deal with an oral care problem last year.
Approximately 114 million Americans, says NADP, have no dental coverage, with 67.7 million of them under 65. "This is about twice the number of medically uninsured that are under 65 years of age," it says. In addition, it adds that people lacking dental benefits are not only more likely to "have extractions and dentures and less likely to have restorative care or receive treatment for gum disease," they are "67 percent more likely to have heart disease; 50 percent more likely to have osteoporosis; and 29 percent more likely to have diabetes."
And many, because they fail to go to the dentist regularly, many are "among the 738,000 Americans annually that end up in emergency rooms for dental treatment."
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