Dental Marketing and Practice Management

Lucky for Utah dentists, a federal agency has vetoed Utah's plan to slash Medicaid payments to dentists.

While the state's dentists received a one-time 24% pay raise in 2008, Utah lawmakers recently reversed that. (And the dentists didn't get their 4.5% cost-of-living raise either.)

Understandably, Utah's dentists objected… and so did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which rejected the plan on the grounds that it would make accessing services even more difficult for dental Medicaid patients – particularly kids seeking a pediatric dentist – not to mention seniors in need of false teeth.

Utah's Medicaid program will now have to scramble to cut other programs, as the 2010 budget relied on cutting dentist payments by $1.4 million.

Read more: Feds reject Utah's low Medicaid pay for dentists