As we come out of the pandemic and into a hopefully normal July 4 weekend, TDMR is issuing our annual survey to find out how dental maintenance organizations have been performing for Medicaid dentists over the last year.
Quiet year so far
To be honest, it's been pretty quiet. We really haven't heard any real complaints about MCNA, DentaQuest or United Healthcare Dental so far.
That's a very good indicator, we hope.
Developments over last year
Of course, there have been a few developments over the last year and a bit.
We failed to notice at the time that former governor Rick Perry went back to MCNA as a Vice-Chairman of their Board of Directors in February of last year, just a few months after MCNA's Texas DMO contract was renewed. According to the press release sent out at the time, Governor Perry was to provide a "strategic vision for the expansion of MCNA Dental’s national platform for dental managed care."
Perhaps part of his advice was the acquisition of MCNA, the self-proclaimed country’s largest insurer for Medicaid and CHIP dental programs with state agencies, by United Healthcare a few months later in November of 2020. The only real mention we could find on the web of this acquisition was an announcement by the TDA. It is not mentioned on either MCNA or United Healthcare's websites. Didn't make a blip in the national business media at all.
The most major development was that United Healthcare Dental started rolling as a DMO in Texas. In our 2020, survey there was a lot of nervousness about a third DMO entering the market. So it will be interesting to see how dentists feel they performed. The oddity of course is that MCNA and United Healthcare Dental are really now the same company but operating as separate entities.
Lastly, as we reported in September of last year, we found out that DMOs can use inducements to parents to get Medicaid-eligible children into their programs, while it is still illegal for dentists to do so.
Take the 2021 survey
The survey from last year has been slightly modified to add in United Healthcare Dental. Survey Monkey's marvellous AI (artificial intelligence) bot says it should take a Texas Medicaid dentist about two minutes to answer. We think it will be less.
Again this year it is entirely anonymous
So if you are a Texas Medicaid dentist, please...
Results from previous surveys
Should you want to see what was reported before, here are our previous surveys:
2017 Dental Maintenance Organization Annual Survey
2017 Dental Maintenance Organization Followup Survey
2018 Dental Maintenance Organization Annual Survey
2019 Dental Maintenance Organization Annual Survey
2020 Dental Maintenance Organization Annual Survey