Delta Dental finds increase in dental coverage enrollment
Adults with coverage were much more likely to report seeing a dentist in the past year.
Trends that pushed up major medical insurance enrollment may be helping to increase the percentage of Americans with dental insurance this year.
About 65% of U.S. adults now have dental insurance, up from 59% in 2023, and up from 56% in 2020, according to results from an online survey conducted by Delta Dental.
Delta Dental is a group of 39 organizations that provide dental coverage for 85 million people, or about 25% of all U.S. residents, through 159,000 employer groups.
The survey sample included 1,000 U.S. adults ages 18 and older.
About 49% of the participants understood that oral health has a connection with heart disease, but fewer than 30% understood that it’s believed that oral health problems are associated with dementia.
The percentage of participants who visited a dentist in 2023 was 83% for the participants with dental insurance and 58% for the participants without dental insurance.
Roughly 22% of the participants said they see out-of-pocket costs as an obstacle to getting emergency dental care.
When an institute associated with the American Dental Association conducted a similar survey in 2022, it found that 17% of the participants cited cost as being a barrier to getting needed dental care during the previous 12 months.
Related: Insurance coverage influences frequency of dental visits by older adults
The association found that the percentage of participants who had failed to get dental care due to cost had hovered under 11% from 2000 through 2007, jumped up a couple points from 2008 through 2012, then fell to about 10% from 196 through 2018.
In 2019, the failure-to get-care rate jumped up to a recent high of 15%.
From 2020 through 2022, the failure-to-get-care rate drifted down to about 13%.
What it means: Companies like Aflac and Unum acquired dental insurers because they saw offering dental as a way to help their agents and brokers get their feet in employers’ doors.
Today, offering dental might be a way for employers and their benefits advisors to find out what the gaps in preventive and routine sick care that opened up during the peak years of the COVID-19 pandemic did to workers’ oral health and overall health.