In 2000, the first Surgeon General’s Report on oral health was released. Oral Health in America provided numerous examples of the connection between oral health and overall health, concluding that “oral health means much more than healthy teeth” and “is essential to the general health and wellbeing of all Americans. (1) Since that report’s publication, there has been a concerted effort for better integration between oral health and overall health across the country.
In 2021, the National Institutes of Health released a follow-up report titled Oral Health in America: Advances and Challenges highlighting the disparities that continued to exist in dental disease burden and access to oral healthcare. (2) In addition, the report focused on the advantages of integrating oral health into overall healthcare and identified implementation challenges and opportunities in this effort. As noted in the report, “commercial health systems and insurers have tested new models of integrated care delivery, with the purpose of improving patient outcomes while reducing cost. An important goal of integration and workforce expansion is to encourage dental team members to work at the top of their collective scope of licensing capabilities in order to maximize access to dental care.”
This integration also has the potential to improve the overall efficiency of healthcare delivery in the United States. For example, the Health Policy Institute of the American Dental Association, the nation’s dental professional organization, estimated that healthcare costs in the United States could be reduced by more than $100 million each year through screening for chronic diseases in dental offices. (3)
To provide a foundation for examining the integration of oral health into overall healthcare and the health equity implications, this brief provides estimates of the number of persons with any dental or medical visits in the year by various individual characteristics, including insurance status, using 2019 data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC). This analysis complements Statistical Brief #537, which examined the number and percentage of persons with dental and medical visits using 2003 to 2018 data. In this brief, we provide total annual estimates for 2019 and further examine dental and medical visits by insurance coverage, age, sex, race/ethnicity, and census region. Using 2017–2019 data from the MEPS-HC, we also provide regional and some state estimates of the percent of persons with dental and medical visits.
A dental-only visit included any reported visit in the year to any type of dental provider, including general dentists, specialists, hygienists, and technicians. A medical-only visit included any reported visit in the year to any physician or nonphysician provider in an office-based, inpatient, outpatient, emergency room, or home health setting. All differences between estimates discussed in the text are statistically significant at the 0.05 level or better unless otherwise noted.