QUESTION: Can you do more to help people with dental anxiety?
ANSWER: In a modern dental office, most anxious patients can be comfortably treated using modern local anesthetics with or without nitrous oxide analgesia. Patients with higher levels of dental anxiety benefit from new oral conscious sedation medications. Some offices, especially oral surgeons, offer intravenous sedation. Dentists who provide these types of sedation must meet specific Dentistry Examining Board permit requirements for education and equipment to assure patient safety. Wisconsin dentists have an excellent record of safety in anesthesia and sedation practices.
QUESTION: What are major issues and challenges facing dentists?
ANSWER: Patients suffer when Wisconsin lawmakers promise care but fail to provide sufficient funding to ensure access. Over the period of a year, an estimated 875,000 residents are enrolled in the state’s Medicaid and BadgerCare programs. Today, nearly one out of every two Wisconsin babies is born to a mother receiving Medical Assistance. The number of people covered by public benefit programs continues to climb, while dentists feel squeezed out of the programs because payments don’t come close to covering basic business expenses. Ninety-five percent of Wisconsin dentists are small-business owners who do not covertly “tax” private-pay patients by cost-shifting losses incurred through participation in a severely underfunded MA program. Private dental offices struggle to provide care for those in need under these constraints. In Wisconsin, state and federal governments spend less than 1 percent, or just $38 million of a $4.4 billion annual medical assistance budget, on oral health programs for children and adults. Individual WDA dentists donate $10,000 to  $12,000 worth of care yearly through their private practices in addition to providing millions of dollars in free services annually through Give Kids A Smile, Head Start exams, Wisconsin Dental Association Foundation’s Donated Dental Services, community clinics and other charitable efforts.
QUESTION: How are we doing with our fluoridation efforts?
ANSWER: Approximately 90 percent of municipal water supplies in Wisconsin are fluoridated. The U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more than 90 other national and international organizations recognize community water fluoridation as one of the most significant public health advances of the 20th century and one of the safest, most cost-effective ways to increase overall oral health. Holmen is the largest municipality in La Crosse County that is not fluoridated. In contrast, in Minnesota, all municipal water supplies are fluoridated by state mandate. A referendum will likely be held regarding this issue in Holmen later this year.
QUESTION: What have been local dental initiatives to help children and adults with dental needs?
ANSWER: For six years, the La Crosse District Dental Society has conducted a  Give Kids A Smile program in conjunction with the WDA and American Dental Association. Each of those years, local dentists donated more than $50,000 in dental treatment to needy children in cooperation with district public school nurses, the county health department and the Boys and Girls Club.
In the past two years, State Sen. Dan Kapanke has co-chaired the La Crosse Dental Care Advocacy Coalition with State Rep. Jennifer Shilling in a bipartisan, communitywide action representing various organizations, all with a stake in improving dental access for low-income residents. Included in this initiative are the county health department, social services groups, hospital emergency rooms, dental practices, community dental clinics, school nurses and other advocates. This coalition is focused particularly on access to care for dental MA patients.  Although the dental pilot project for La Crosse County was not ultimately included in the most recent state budget, our coalition has been successful in facilitating better access for urgent-care patients. Because of the commitment and organization of our community-based coalition, the WDA has selected the La Crosse area to be the site of its first Mission of Mercy or MOM program in 2009. This two-day volunteer event will bring dentists and dental office staff from across the state to help local dental professionals provide charitable preventive and urgent dental care to hundreds of needy patients on a first-come, first-served basis.