Dental Medicine’s Dark Secret

Insurers should have to bend over backwards to court you.

Odin Halvorson
5 min readNov 3, 2022

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Twenty-six percent of people with untreated cavities, between the ages of 20–44, die. That number is thirteen percent for children 5–19.[1] And yet dental healthcare is not considered essential healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. Why?

To understand this criminal oversight requires stepping back in time. In order to understand the failure of dental healthcare in the United States, we have to first understand where healthcare as a whole went wrong.

In the 1900s, under the eye of Teddy Roosevelt, the United States finally stood up to the corporate robber barons for the first time.

At both state and federal level, the first efforts to curb the excesses of the greedy and wealthy took shape. Antitrust efforts tackled the big manufacturing, transportation, and energy monopolies.

Child labor, overlong workweeks, and deplorable working conditions were also on the table. For the first time in the history of the United States, democracy was actually working properly for the little guy.

The first major push toward some form of healthcare insurance also took place during this time. Previously, employers were directly responsible for injuries to their employees, but the fight to…

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Odin Halvorson
Odin Halvorson

Written by Odin Halvorson

A futurist/socialist/fantasist writer, editor, and scholar. MFA/MLIS. Free access to my articles at OdinHalvorson.substack.com | More over at OdinHalvorson.com.