You Can Be Good-Looking and Healthy, But If Your Teeth Are Messed Up, It’s an Issue

From:Vihaan Banga

Vihaan Banga is a rising senior at Olentangy Liberty High School who is involved with The Oral Health Center in Westerville and helped organize its recent Free Dental Day.

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“You Can Be Good-Looking and Healthy, But If Your Teeth Are Messed Up, It’s an Issue”

A young man sat in the waiting room of The Oral Health Center in Westerville, about to see the dentist for the first time in his life. He grew up in Haiti, where, he explained, going to a dentist every six months isn’t really a thing. You go when something hurts.

When I asked what brought him in, he told me his parents had gone to similar free day events a year or two earlier, and that he decided to do the same. Then, confidently, he said, “You can be good looking and healthy, but if your teeth are messed up, it’s an issue.”

I had organized the day, and that Friday morning I sat behind the registration desk and watched it happen. Nearly thirty people had called to register. The Oral Health Center opened at 8 a.m., and over the next seven hours the chairs stayed full: exams, X-rays, oral cancer screenings, extractions, every service free of charge.

But free care isn’t the story. The story is who walked through the door.

A 32-year-old semi-truck driver came in because a friend sent him a screenshot of our flyer. His last dental visit was the previous October. When I asked what his job offered for dental coverage, he shrugged. “I don’t really pay attention to what they offer.” His job probably covers something. He’d never gone looking. He isn’t unusual.

Another woman came in who actually has dental insurance. She’d spent months trying to find a provider that accepted her plan. Multiple offices had told her no. She found her way to the Free Dental Day because the only insurance that mattered for the day was no insurance at all.

A man came in who hadn’t been to a dentist in ten years. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint what had changed between his last visit and that Friday morning, only that something had.

These patients didn’t have one thing in common. They had four different versions of the same problem. One had never been a part of the system. One was inside it but didn’t engage with it. One had tried to engage, and the system had failed her. One had been engaged once and quietly slipped out. The endpoint was the same: a chair in a free dental day at a Westerville office building tucked behind a row of brick storefronts.

The standard conversation related to dental access in America is about insurance, or the lack of it. According to the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, roughly 72 million American adults (more than one in four adults) don’t have dental insurance. That number is real and worth knowing. But it’s also incomplete. Insurance is one barrier. Confusion about what your job covers is another. A cultural norm about whether routine care is normal is another. The frustration of calling office after office and hearing “we don’t take your plan” is another. The slow drift away from a dentist you used to see, for reasons you can’t fully name, is another.

The patients I met on Friday weren’t proof that dental care is unaffordable. They were proof that affordability is just one of the things standing between people and a checkup. The system in its current form isn’t meeting them where they are. A free day at a community dental practice met them, not because the day fixed everything, but because it asked nothing of them except that they show up.

The Haitian man, before he left, said he planned to come more often now. He’d already told friends to call. He’d come because his parents had; now someone else would come because he had. That ripple, more than any single day of free care, is the actual effect of programs like this. It is people learning, person by person, family by family, that the door isn’t locked.

That’s a model worth building more of.