Medicaid patients in Milwaukee continue to face healthcare inequities, made even more challenging by continued federal budget cuts and other barriers. Children are especially impacted by shortages in care, particularly dental care. There are currently over 80,000 kids in the Milwaukee area that struggle to find care because so few dental clinics accept Medicaid.
One local nonprofit, Community Smiles Dental, is working to fill this need by serving children, pregnant women and people with special needs in the community who are on Medicaid. "Because dental becomes a little bit more of an afterthought, the providers that can take that insurance are less than what would otherwise be available with general healthcare," notes Community Smiles Dental CEO, Scott Marshall.
Before the nonprofit was officially founded in 2007, its inception came from nurses in the Waukesha school system according to Marshall. "[They] were seeing more and more kids come into the nurse's office and they had tooth pain. And as it turns out, their parents had not been taking them to dentists because they could not find a dentist who would take state insurance," he explains.
"And so working together with some local dentists and Waukesha Memorial Hospital, Community Smiles Dental was born to be a location that just served kids whose parents relied on Medicaid. And it was set up as a nonprofit because those low reimbursement rates for Medicaid could be mitigated by fundraising. And so that's how it is able to work and be able to thrive, honestly, as an option for those parents."
Community Smiles Dental also serves expectant mothers as well and youth and adults with special health care needs, since patients with physical, developmental, or cognitive disabilities face additional barriers to accessing dental care in traditional private practice settings.
So far the nonprofit has clinics in Menomonee Falls and Waukesha, but the need is always expanding. Last year Community Smiles Dental saw the most patients they've ever had: 4,861.
"That is whether it is preventative, where it's the cleaning and the checkup, or restorative, where we're taking care of a cavity," notes Marshall. "We're seeing just the tip of the iceberg of the amount of kids that really do need the amount care that we have, but we are working to be able to increase that."
He adds that there are very few nonprofit dental clinics in the state of Wisconsin, and Community Smiles Dental is the only one that focuses on pediatric dentistry. With such a pressing need, Marshall says they plan to expand by adding a third clinic.
"When we opened a Menomonee Falls clinic, more and more people were signing up and they were ... traveling from Milwaukee. You had an idea that there was that need, but to know that these parents would go that extra mile to make sure that their kids see a dentist, it really told us it was pretty obvious that the next place we needed to look to add to the Community Smiles Dental Family was to open a clinic in Milwaukee," he explains. "We are in the process, we're identifying a location, and we are hoping to be able to open by mid-2027 our third clinic right in the heart of Milwaukee."
