Please tell us how you, your family or your community has benefited from Medicaid coverage for dental care, vision care, and transportation assistance: Vision, dental and transportation assistance can be preventative care and detect major medical problems before they are exacerbated. In the grand scheme of all things healthcare, this coverage is cheap and can reap big overall savings in the long run.

Please tell us how eliminating these benefits would affect you, your family, or your community: If someone needs dental care and doesn’t have Medicaid dental coverage, my understanding is that the only thing that is able to be reimbursed is an extraction. Extracting a tooth for a cavity or other problem where the tooth can be salvaged makes no sense medically or for the overall health of a person.

We have a terrible opioid problem in our state. Most people who develop an opioid abuse problem began using pain medication through legitimate sources for a legitimate medical issue. If someone has dental coverage and routinely goes to the dentist, the chances of a major dental emergency is lessened. Without dental care, someone who develops a dental emergency will be in great pain with their only recourse being the emergency room. They will treat their pain with opioids and could end up on a path to addiction that is all too familiar to our community. Let’s do what makes economic sense and care for others the way that we would want to be treated.