Dentists Flee U.K. Health System, Patients Pay More

Bloomberg reports:

A rebellion by U.K. dentists against the latest government contract has led more than 7 million Britons to avoid state-subsidized dental care in the past two years.

A Citizens Advice Bureau survey released today reports that 4.7 million people were forced to use private care since April 2006 at twice the cost of a state-funded dentist because so many practitioners refused to see National Health Service patients.

Another 36 percent of people, or 2.7 million, who responded to the poll by London-based Citizens Advice have gone without any treatment for almost two years. Under the NHS, every resident is eligible for care by a local dental practice.

Since the government changed its contract with 21,000 NHS dentists in April 2006, one in 10 dentists stopped offering state-funded services, saying the contract required them to increase their workloads while limiting their earnings. The U.K.'s private dental market grew 63 percent to 3 billion pounds ($5.9 billion) from 2002 to 2006, overtaking the 2.4 billion pounds budgeted by the government.

``Dentists are exiting the NHS either completely or they're spending a much smaller proportion of their time doing NHS work,'' said Sharon Grant, chairman of the public advocacy Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Healthcare. The Birmingham, England-based group published a survey in October with similar findings.

The shortage of dentists willing to take NHS payments has resulted in an increase in the use of private dental insurance. The number of subscribers to dental plans, which cost 15 to 20 pounds a month for basic care, rose 31 percent to 2.9 million in 2006, according to London-based market research firm Laing & Buisson.

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