Canadian dentists desperate for details on federal dental care plan

News release from Canada’s Provincial and Territorial Dental Associations

Canadian dentists to MPs: We need answers about the Canadian Dental Care Plan

Lack of consultation with provincial and territorial dental associations is worrying

There are only two months left before the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP) becomes available to many more Canadians. Yet more than 25,000 dentists nationwide are in the dark about how the Government of Canada will safeguard access to dental care.

In a letter sent to Members of Parliament (MPs) this week, the presidents of provincial and territorial dental associations across the country asked how the government will:

Safeguard employer-provided dental plans that two-thirds of Canadians currently have access to?
Ensure that a strong federal program can be coordinated with existing provincial programs?
Protect patient choice and maintain the patient-provider relationship?
Ensure minimal, efficient administration that promotes timely access to care?
Respect the costs of delivering dental care to maximize provider participation?
Increase the number of dental assistants and dental hygienists to meet the demands of the CDCP?

Dentists want to champion a CDCP that will respect patients, providers, and taxpayers. The provincial and territorial dental associations are concerned that the CDCP has been compromised by a lack of meaningful consultation with dentists – who will be expected to deliver on the government’s promises.

The CDCP is currently in final planning stages, with a potential rollout in 2024 that will attempt to increase access to uninsured Canadians under 18, people with disabilities, and seniors who have an annual family income of less than $90,000. Dentists believe all Canadians need access to dental care. If not done properly, two-thirds of Canadians who have great employer-provided dental plans could lose their coverage and be forced into a worse plan. Costs would then skyrocket, which means the $13 billion over five years the government set aside would not be enough to sustain the plan.

Let’s take the time to get it right. We can increase access to dental care right now through an expansion of the interim measure already in place – the Canada Dental Benefit. This establishes a fixed dollar amount that a patient can use to be reimbursed for dental-related expenses.

Facts:

Canada’s provincial and territorial dental associations represent more than 25,000 licensed dentists working in more than 16,000 offices. They treat more than 30 million Canadians every year and employ at least 50,000¹ oral health care workers.
Over 60 per cent of Canadians have a dentist they visit on a regular basis.²
A recent survey commissioned by Health Canada found that nearly nine out 10 Canadians are satisfied with the Canada Dental Benefit.³

Quotes:

“To succeed, this plan needs to work for both patients and providers, and to work in each province. What we are recommending is based on decades of experience and caring for the oral health needs of the more than 30 million people that come into our dental offices across the country every year.” — Dr. Bruce Yaholnitsky, President, Alberta Dental Association

“Poorly designed programs do not improve access to care, and they leave the most vulnerable people in society behind. This is an historic opportunity, but only if the government gets it right. Dentists have the expertise, experience, and skills to know what it takes to ensure good oral and overall health.” — Dr. Rob Wolanski, President, British Columbia Dental Association

“As dentists we are excited to be a part of this Canadian dental care program, but there are key critical issues that need to be included for this program to be successful.” — Dr. Scott Leckie, President, Manitoba Dental Association

“New Brunswick dentists are already extremely busy with the recent spike in population and the backlog in demand for services related to Covid-19. This program was intended to provide dental care to the 35 per cent of Canadians who are uninsured. It needs to be easy to understand and to administer, and to be fair to all parties, including patients, dental care providers and taxpayers. Canadians need to know what benefits are being provided and which are not, before they arrive at the dental clinic.” — Dr. Joanah Campbell, President, New Brunswick Dental Society

“The new program must be sustainable in terms of funding, and easy to understand and access. It has to be patient-centred and work for everyone.” — Dr. Shane Roberts, President, Newfoundland & Labrador Dental Association

“While the CDCP has the potential to improve the lives of many Canadians, this can only be achieved if it’s done right. To ensure the greatest possible outcome, we must consider all of the moving pieces and take a patient-centred approach.” — Dr. Juli Waterbury, President, Nova Scotia Dental Association

“The CDCP could be a game-changer for Canadians’ access to dental care. But we have one chance to get it right. Here in Ontario, we have seen that dental care programs developed without the input of dentists are doomed to fail. Just look at the Ontario Seniors Dental Care Program, where waiting lists are up to two years long in some areas, and some patients have to travel ridiculously long distances to receive treatment.” — Dr. Brock Nicolucci, President, Ontario Dental Association

“This new program has the potential to improve access to care for many Canadians. It must be sustainable, patient-centred, and easy to access for patients. A poorly designed program will not improve access to care which is something we would like to avoid. We want this to work for Canadians.” — Dr. Derek Thiessen, President, College of Dental Surgeons of Saskatchewan

Related Topics:#CanadianDentalCarePlan #DentalAssociation

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Policymakers in Ottawa and Edmonton maintain broken health-care system

Published on May 9, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail

What’s preventing these reforms? In a word, Ottawa.

To say Albertans, and indeed all Canadians, are getting poor value for their health-care dollars is a gross understatement. In reality, Canada remains among the highest spenders on health care in the developed world, in exchange for one of the least accessible universal health-care systems. And while Canadians are increasingly open to meaningful reform, policymakers largely cling to their stale approach of more money, platitudes and little actual change.

In 2021 (the latest year of available data), among high-income universal health-care countries, Canada spent the highest share of its economy on health care (after adjusting for age differences between countries). For that world-class level of spending, Canada ranked 28th in the availability of physicians, 23rd in hospital beds, 25th in MRI scanners and 26th in CT scanners. And we ranked dead last on wait times for specialist care and non-emergency surgeries.

This abysmal performance has been consistent since at least the early 2000s with Canada regularly posting top-ranked spending alongside bottom-ranked performance in access to health-care.

On a provincial basis, Albertans are no better off. Alberta’s health-care system ranks as one of the most expensive in Canada on a per-person basis (after adjusting for population age and sex) while wait times in Alberta were 21 per cent longer than the national average in 2023.

And what are governments doing about our failing health-care system? Not much it seems, other than yet another multi-billion-dollar federal spending commitment (from the Trudeau government) and some bureaucratic shuffling (by the Smith government) paired with grandiose statements of how this will finally solve the health-care crisis.

But people aren’t buying it anymore. Canadians increasingly understand that more money for an already expensive and failing system is not the answer, and are increasingly open to reforms based on higher-performing universal health-care countries where the public system relies more on private firms and entrepreneurs to deliver publicly-funded services. Indeed, according to one recent poll, more than six in 10 Canadians agree that Canada should emulate other countries that allow private management of public hospitals, and more than half of those polled would like increased access to care provided by entrepreneurs.

What’s preventing these reforms?

In a word, Ottawa. The large and expanding federal cash transfers so often applauded by premiers actually prevent provinces from innovating and experimenting with more successful health-care policies. Why? Because to receive federal transfers, provinces must abide by the terms and conditions of the Canada Health Act (CHA), which prescribes often vaguely defined federal preferences for health policy and explicitly disallows certain reforms such as cost-sharing (where patients pay fees for some services, with protections for low-income people).

That threat of financial penalty discourages the provinces from following the examples of countries that provide more timely universal access to quality care such as Germany, Switzerland, Australia and the Netherlands. These countries follow the same blueprint, which includes patient cost-sharing for physician and hospital services (again, with protections for vulnerable populations including low-income individuals), private competition in the delivery of universally accessible services with money following patients to hospitals and surgical clinics, and allowing private purchases of care. Yet if Alberta adopted this blueprint, which has served patients in these other countries so well, it would risk losing billions in health-care transfers from Ottawa.

Finally, provinces have seemingly forgot the lesson from Saskatchewan’s surgical initiative, which ran between 2010 and 2014. That initiative, which included contracting out publicly financed surgeries to private clinics, reduced wait lists in Saskatchewan from among the highest in the country to among the shortest. And when the initiative ended, wait times began to grow again.

The simple reality of health care in every province including Alberta is that the government system is failing despite a world-class price tag. The solutions to this problem are known and increasingly desired by Canadians. Ottawa just needs to get out of the way and allow the provinces to genuinely reform the way we finance and deliver universal health care.