Letter: Expanding access to dental health care on reservations

Some of the world’s highest rates of untreated oral disease exist right here in our country. Nearly half the residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota have missing teeth or no teeth at all. The average dentist-to-population ratio in the United States is 1 to 1,600. On Pine Ridge it is 1 to 3,800.

Dental services for Native people need to be adequately financed, but we must also expand access by allowing new midlevel providers to provide routine dental care to people when and where they need it: in their own communities.