Health Insurance
Dental Care and Children with Special Health Care Needs: A Population-Based Perspective
This paper grew out of a project reviewing progress in children's oral health after Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General was published in 2000. It includes a summary of advances in national surveillance of children with special health care needs (CSHCN), and presents more recent data on unmet dental care need among CSHCN. To that end, we used the 2006 National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs to determine the prevalence of unmet dental care need among CSHCN and to compare this within subgroups of CSHCN, as well as to children without special health care needs, and to results from the previous iteration of this survey.Putting Teeth in CHIP: 1997–2009 Retrospective of Congressional Action on Children's Oral Health
When Congress reenacted the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 2009, it incorporated a range of dental provisions that had not been considered when the program was initiated in 1997. This paper posits that this change evidences the establishment of pediatric oral health as a distinct policy issue within Congressional deliberations. During this period, the US Congress received impetus for action on behalf of children's oral health from multiple streams of activity: the Surgeon General's Report, Oral Health in America, policies enacted by states, advocacy by the professions, promotion by policy groups, attention by the press, and actions of federal agencies.
