ADA president highlights oral health as essential during dentech keynote
‘We need to walk the walk on the mouth-body connection’
Oral health is essential to overall health, but the current dental benefits system does not reflect that, ADA President Brett Kessler, D.D.S., told the audience of ADA Forsyth dentech 2025.
“Can we agree that the mouth is connected to the body? Everyone good with that?” Dr. Kessler asked, to the agreement of those in attendance.
“The benefit system that we’re in disconnects the mouth from the body. This is where the biggest change has to happen,” he continued.
During his keynote address Oct. 9 at the ADA Forsyth Institute in Somerville, Massachusetts, Dr. Kessler focused on oral health care as essential health care and the need for dental benefits to become true dental insurance.
“We need to reform the current benefits system, we need to expand the current benefits system, and we need to walk the walk on the mouth-body connection,” he said, adding that dental benefits have not kept up with the cost of living.
Reforms could include mandated coverage for certain essential dental care services, no-cost preventive services, out-of-pocket spending limits for consumers, medical loss ratios and other accountability measures for insurers, Dr. Kessler said.
He pointed to reinventing the way services related to oral health care are covered. Oral hygiene instruction, nutrition counseling, smoking cessation and more should all be billable to dental insurance, he said.
“All that’s billable in the medical world; it’s not billable in dentistry,” Dr. Kessler said. “But all of that is essential to our dentistry being successful. But yet, we don’t get paid for it.”
He said dentists are just expected to provide those additional services, and they do, because it’s the right thing to do.
“What if all this coaching and all these questions and questionnaires we have with our patients, what if we help them become healthier, and what if we got paid when it shows that we made our patients healthier in addition to fixing their oral conditions?” Dr. Kessler said.
He highlighted the ADA’s mission of helping dentists succeed and supporting the advancement of the health of the public and its vision of empowering the dental profession to achieve optimal health for all. He pointed out both statements list “health” rather than “oral health,” reflecting dentists’ essential role in improving people’s overall health.
In January, the ADA placed an editorial penned by Dr. Kessler in The Washington Post and sent letters to then-President-elect Donald Trump and every member of the 119th Congress, emphasizing oral health’s critical role in improving the lives of Americans.
Since then, Dr. Kessler amplified that message in roundtable discussions, congressional hearings and public forums, including a session with the Food and Drug Administration.
In May, he and other ADA leaders met at the White House with Heidi Overton, M.D., Ph.D., deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy and principal author of the Make America Healthy Again report, to stress the importance of community water fluoridation, infection control, oral health infrastructure and continued National Institutes of Health research funding.
Dr. Kessler also joined Scott D. Smith, D.D.S., immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, in authoring an editorial published in September by the Journal of the American Medical Association Health Forum that warned against efforts to eliminate community water fluoridation, stating such decisions could unravel decades of progress in public oral health.
ADA Forsyth dentech took place Oct. 9-10. For more from the event, visit forsyth.org/dentech.
