Medicaid:

State and Federal Actions Have Been Taken to Improve Children's Access to Dental Services, but More Can Be Done

GAO-10-112T: Published: Oct 7, 2009. Publicly Released: Oct 7, 2009.

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Dental disease remains a significant problem for children in Medicaid. Although dental services are a mandatory benefit for the 30 million children served by Medicaid, these children often experience elevated levels of dental problems and have difficulty finding dentists to treat them. In testimony before your Subcommittee last September, we reported that children in Medicaid were almost twice as likely to have untreated cavities as children with private insurance and that the percentage of children in Medicaid who received any dental care was far below the Department of Health and Human Service's (HHS) target for low-income children. Concerns about low-income children's poor oral health, inadequate access to dental services, low payment rates for dental services, and insufficient federal and state efforts to address oral health access problems are long-standing. During subcommittee hearings in May 2007 and February 2008, you raised concerns about the effectiveness of federal oversight of state Medicaid dental services by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees Medicaid at the federal level. This testimony is based on our report, released at this hearing, Medicaid: State and Federal Actions Have Been Taken to Improve Children's Access to Dental Services, but Gaps Remain.

States and CMS have made concerted efforts to improve access to dental services for children in Medicaid. However, information on the oral health of and receipt of dental services by Medicaid children show that more needs to be done. Although many states have reported moderate increases in access to Medicaid dental services, states responding to our survey reported that low provider and beneficiary participation, and administrative burdens--many of the same factors that contributed to the low use of dental services in 2000--still present barriers to access today. CMS's reviews of states' efforts have identified deficiencies in several state Medicaid programs, but CMS has not required corrective actions by states or planned additional dental reviews. In our report, we are making four recommendations to CMS to strengthen the agency's monitoring of state Medicaid dental services for children and help states improve children's access to Medicaid dental services. Our recommendations include developing a plan to review dental services for Medicaid children in all states with low utilization rates, ensuring that states found to have inadequate MCO dental provider networks take action to strengthen these networks, working with stakeholders to develop needed guidance on topics of concern to states, and identifying ways to improve sharing of promising practices among states.

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