Dentists in teeth of storm of over-regulation

How hard is dentistry? I think I could, with instruction, figure out an x-ray machine before morning tea and I doubt that the drilling would take more than a few weeks.

Getting the anaesthetic doses right might require a little trial and error but there isn’t anything in the mundane practice of dentistry that seems especially complex. So why should it take five years to become a registered dentist?

New Zealand, like most nations, has fallen into the regulatory trap of demanding even mundane tasks require specialist training. A dental hygienist now needs a minimum two years of tertiary training. Two years. To learn how to floss and take a plaster mould.

The ever growing requirements are mandated by the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 that established the Dental Council which spends its time designing new and complex regulations to ensure that dentistry remains the exclusive preserve of the over-qualified.

Needless to say, there is a shortage of dental hygienists and fewer than 200 people qualify to become dentists annually.

The end result of this mass of regulation is to raise the cost of dentistry so that only nice middle class people can afford dental visits. To protect poor people from under-trained dentists, the government has ensured that the poor cannot afford any dentistry. Problem solved. Needless to say, this bureaucratic own-goal now requires a solution. Labour, fresh from congratulating themselves on being selected by Winston Peters to govern, voted for free dental care at their recent Dunedin conference.

This is a failure of imagination. We cannot comprehend an environment where consumers would learn quickly which firms employ competent dentists and which back-yard operators are a sepsis infection waiting to happen.

The cellphone in your hand is more complex than even the most involved dental procedure. Stores that sell them have an incentive not to sell you junk that doesn’t function in the same way a dental practice will have an incentive to ensure its staff know what they are doing.

Dentistry is expensive because it’s over-regulated, yet we are so conditioned into our belief in government that the idea of abandoning the micromanagement of who can floss your teeth seems absurd to most.