Holy Appalachia! You have got to be kidding me.

I read a shocking and sad thing about New Jersey that underscores how we live in a have and have not society.

The number of kids in New Jersey walking around with painful, untreated tooth decay far exceeds the national average. You might expect this in Mississippi. You wouldn’t expect it here. After all, New Jersey has the nation’s second-highest average household income.

With that level of affluence, how is it possible that 36% of New Jersey’s third graders have untreated tooth decay when the national average is 20%? That’s more than a third of all our 8-year-olds and almost double the national average.

How?

Canva / TSM Illustration
Canva / TSM Illustration
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According to an article on northjersey.com, it’s the nightmare of trying to find dental practices willing to take Medicaid, the coverage New Jersey’s poor rely on. The ones that say they do often won’t book families an appointment.

The New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute experimented. They invented a 2-year-old child on Medicaid and tried to book an appointment at more than 800 dental practices. They found that less than half of the dental practices listed as accepting Medicaid actually would book an appointment. Ultimately, according to the experiment, less than 10 percent of New Jersey’s more than 4,500 dentists accept Medicaid.

And it is little kids who didn’t ask to be brought into this world who suffer. Again, more than a third of New Jersey’s third graders have untreated tooth decay. And it’s often severe.

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Canva / TSM Illustration
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This is pitiful. We are better than this. Or at least we should be. Those in the know fear things will get even worse with possible Medicaid cuts coming under President Trump.

Read the full story here.

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Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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