28. An Oral Health Benefit in Medicare Part B: It’s Time to Include Oral Health in Health Care

Aravamudhan, Krishna; Preble, David; Vujicic, Marko; Yarbrough, Cassandra; Kertesz, Kata; Kwok, Wey-Wey; Chaffin, Jeffrey; Monopoli, Michael; Fish-Parcham, Cheryl; Burroughs, Melissa; Willard, Patrick; Goldberg, Jennifer H.; B, Rogers; Truett, Beth; Jones, Judith A.; Manski, Richard J.; Chávez, Elisa M.

doi:10.2105/9780875533063ch28

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“…Nonetheless, our finding that dental care use is associated with an improvement in overall health and reductions in the incidence of heart disease and stroke of between 2.7% and 11.6% helps inform the debate over whether to add a dental care benefit to the Medicare program. Previous research suggests that such a benefit would increase the use and lower the financial burden of dental care, and this analysis suggests there could be an additional health benefit through lower rates of chronic disease (Kreider et al 2015;Manski et al 2015, Aravamudhan et al 2019Meyerhoefer et al 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Dental Care Use, Edentulism, and Systemic Health among Older Adults

et al. 2021

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Past research suggests there are systematic associations between oral health and chronic illness among older adults. Although causality has not yet been credibly established, periodontitis has been found to be associated with higher risk of both heart disease and stroke. We advance this literature by estimating the direct association between dental care use and systemic health using multiple waves of the 1992 to 2016 Health and Retirement Study. Through the inclusion of individual fixed effects in our regression models, we account for unobservable time-invariant characteristics of individuals that might otherwise bias estimates of the association between dental care use and health. We find statistically significant negative associations between dental care use and the number of health conditions, self-reported overall health, the incidence of heart disease, and the incidence of stroke. In particular, the use of dental care within the past 2 y is associated with a 2.7% reduction in the likelihood of being diagnosed with a heart condition and a reduction in the likelihood of a stroke diagnosis of between 5.3% and 11.6%. We also find large positive correlations between edentulism and the measures of chronic illness. Associations from models estimated separately for men and women are qualitatively similar to one another. These findings provide additional motivation for the consideration of a Medicare dental benefit.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%