One of the many arguments for universal health care has been a practical one: Folks who don't have coverage don't get checkups. That means nagging problems get worse until folks wind up in the hospital and are faced with really serious - and expensive - medical issues that will someone will have to pay for. Well, it's the same with teeth. More than 100 million people lack dental insurance in this country, and publicly supported dental clinics have months-long waiting lists. So it shouldn't come as a big surprise to see that 27 percent of children and 29 percent of adults had cavities going untreated in 2003 and 2004, the highest level of untreated decay since the late 1980s. From the NYT:

In some cases, the results of poor dental care have been deadly. A child in Mississippi and another in Maryland died this year from infections caused by decayed teeth. “Most dentists consider themselves to be in the business of dentistry rather than the practice of dentistry,” said Dr. David A. Nash, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Kentucky. “I’m a cynic about my profession, but the data are there. It’s embarrassing.” Dr. Terry D. Dickinson, a practicing dentist who is also the executive director of the Virginia Dental Association, says he believes that dentists are charitable and want to provide care to poor patients. But dentists are also in business; they must pay rent and employee salaries, and they deserve fair fees, he said.

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Dentists’ incomes have grown faster than that of the typical American and the incomes of medical doctors. Formerly poor relations to physicians, American dentists in general practice made an average salary of $185,000 in 2004, the most recent data available. That figure is similar to what non-specialist doctors make, but dentists work far fewer hours. Dental surgeons and orthodontists average more than $300,000 annually. “Dentists make more than doctors,” said Morris M. Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist. “If I had a kid going into the sciences, I’d tell them to become a dentist.”