The Irish Dental Association is calling on the government to implement a voucher scheme to fastrack reform of the service provided to Medical card patients.
The annual cost of such a scheme offering a voucher for €100 towards dental care would be approximately €108 million.
While vouchers of a higher value, between €200 and €500 involve a total cost per annum of €93m and €232.5m respectively.
Dentists have been leaving the scheme resulting in the scheme now being on the verge of collapse with only 750 dentists treating medical card patients, which is less than half the number of dentists providing the service up to two years ago.
This means that there is a dentist per 2,000 medical card patients with no service in some parts of the country.
Reimbursement levels to dentists were reduced following the financial crisis of 2008 and treatments available to medical card holders suspended or available in emergency cases only.
This has not changed in the 13 years since.
The spend on the medical card scheme in 2021 was €39.6m over a 50% reduction on the €86m spend in 2009.
