Many Guard need dental care before deployment

FORT LEWIS, Wash. – About 30 percent of the 4,500 National Guardsmen called to active duty in Washington last year had dental conditions that made them undeployable until their teeth were fixed.

It took a Herculean effort to get soldiers to the dentist before the 81st Brigade Combat Team dispatched to Iraq in March 2004.

Washington National Guard officials said the problem was simple: Many guardsmen lacked dental insurance and were unable or unwilling to pay for care.

“We spend an awful lot of money making sure the MI-AI (tank) is ready to be deployed. We spend absolutely nothing on physical readiness of soldiers prior to mobilization,” said Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, head of the Washington National Guard. “It is a significant point of failure.”

It’s a national issue, with 20 percent of the Army’s citizen soldiers arriving at mobilization sites with dental conditions that made them nondeployable.

The House Armed Services Committee last Wednesday passed a $441 billion defense bill that included a provision to provide permanent, government-paid health and dental insurance to National Guard members before they mobilize.

If the provision survives when the final bill goes to the House floor this week, it would cost $3.8 billion over 5 years.

During Persian Gulf War mobilizations in 1990-91, the Army found that significant numbers of reservists could not be deployed due to poor dental status. It began collecting information on the health of non-active duty personnel.

Active-duty soldiers are provided dental care. If they don’t have employer-provided dental insurance, guardsmen can enroll in a government plan that costs about $10 monthly.

The fees pay for annual examinations, with a sliding scale for deductibles on major dental work, taking into account the specific procedure and soldier’s rank.

Lowenberg, in an interview with National Guard & Defense Review Magazine, noted that 40 percent of Guard members nationally still have no dental plan.

Last year, the Army established new readiness guidelines, including a goal that 95 percent of mobilized soldiers would show up with teeth healthy enough to deploy.

The guidelines reiterated a previous policy requiring soldiers submit a form verifying they had an annual dental evaluation from a civilian dentist.

In a 2003 report, however, the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, discovered the Army rarely checked whether the required exams had been performed.

The Army doesn’t want distracted soldiers suffering from toothaches. Nor does it want to remove soldiers from their units during operations.

But when the 81st Brigade was called to active duty in November 2003, about 1,200 were determined to be dental Class 3, meaning they would likely experience problems within a year, and therefore could not be deployed in a combat zone.

Once activated, the guardsmen had their health care paid for by the military, and most were treated at Fort Lewis and deployed to Iraq on time.

In 2004, U.S. lawmakers made it possible for guardsmen to receive free dental care when placed on alert status – usually several weeks before activation.