Greater need lifts estimate of dental-care costs by $7B

The federal government now expects far more Canadians with long-overdue dental needs to sign up for its insurance plan, and the health minister says that’s why the estimated cost has risen by $7 billion.

In its 2023 budget Tuesday, the government revealed the federally administered insurance program will be far more expensive over the next five years than it originally thought.

It is also projecting that ongoing costs after that will more than double to $4.4 billion per year, up from $1.7 billion.

Duclos said administration costs have not contributed to driving up the price.

“It’s more people with greater needs,” he said in an interview Thursday.

“The fact that this is appearing to be in high demand, and in high need, is probably the outcome that for too many years prior to that program, there were people that were just not going to see a dentist for prevention purposes.”

Dentists could end up seeing as many as nine million more patients who didn’t have coverage before, new estimates suggest.

There are a lot of people who don’t make enough money to be able to afford dental care, but make too much to qualify for provincial programs for people with low income, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday.

“We want to close that gap for working Canadians,” Trudeau said at a press conference in Moncton.

The program is designed for people without insurance whose household income falls below $90,000 per year. Families who make less than $70,000 will not need to make co-payments.

Duclos said the scale of the program should not be underestimated — it’s bigger than just about any other permanent government benefit program to date.

“It’s twice as large as old age security, it’s larger than (the) Canada child benefit in terms of the number of families and children, it’s larger than (the guaranteed income supplement), it’s larger than the early learning and child-care program that we’re putting into place,” he said.

Dental care is the centrepiece of the confidence-and-supply deal the Liberals signed with the NDP in March 2022.

The New Democrats have pledged to vote with the government on key items to prevent an election before 2025 in exchange for progress on certain priorities.

That includes firm timelines to launch the dental-care program by the end of this year for lower-income, uninsured children under the age of 18, seniors and people with disabilities. Full implementation is expected by 2025.

Within two weeks of signing that deal, the Liberal government put forward a budget that included federal dental care. Duclos said more work has been done since then to get a better sense of the cost.

He said they realized demand would be higher than expected when seeing uptake of the dental benefit for children under 12 this year.

The Liberals expected the temporary benefit would go to roughly 500,000 children between Oct. 1, 2022, and June 30, 2024.

But the government has already cut 240,000 cheques to help families pay for oral health appointments.