Dental Care: It’s Not a Luxury

Dentist Negron teaches Mousella how to brush her teeth.

March April 2003
Text and Photos by Richard Bermack

“Our mission is to provide quality dental care to a population that doesn’t have access to it in the general private sector. We are very stressed already because we really cannot come close to providing all the care that’s needed. And I’m not talking about fancy care,” states Norma Solarz, who manages La Clinica’s dental clinic.

Dentist Norma Solarz

“If we can’t provide care to adults in the Medicaid system I don’t know where these people are going to go with their toothaches.” She fears that many of these people will end up in the emergency room with serious infections. “If you’ve got disease in your mouth, you’re a sick person. High levels of bacteria in the mouth are involved in cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” she explains.

Dentistry is a field in which prevention is definitely key. Solarz fears that due to the cutbacks people won’t get check-ups and will then have vastly more expensive needs when they start losing their teeth and need denture work. “It’s poor economy to not spend the money at this end for these patients, because down the road the expenses go up as they need more and more expensive kinds of care and their health begins to fail more significantly.”

Dentist Holly Gonder

Holly Gonder, another dentist at the clinic, echoes Solarz’ concern. “There’s so much need in this community. We have people coming in who are in their twenties and have never been to a dentist before.” She also wants to make it clear that dental care is not a luxury: “Good dental care is important for people to eat, for them to be able to socialize with other people. Someone might feel, ‘I can’t get a job, because I can’t smile, I feel very embarrassed.’ There’s a lot of missed work and school due to dental pain.”

La Clinica was scheduled to open a new dental clinic with 12 more dental chairs. The state funded the facility but has now cut the funding for the staff who were to provide the services. The dental clinic is scheduled for $169,000 in cuts at its Fruitvale clinic and $ 133,000 at its Pittsburg clinic, and $167,000 more that was to go to its new clinic.