Thank you very much. I appreciated your attendance at our function, and thank you so much for the comments.
Absolutely, when we take a look at the list of services that are provided, we see that it is the bare minimum. It falls outside of what we would consider good care. You're absolutely right. When I take a look at a cavity on a tooth and there's no coverage for it, it would be like a medical doctor taking a look at some cancer and saying, “Well, that cancer is not quite big enough for me to operate on. I'm going to have to wait until it gets bigger.” That's the dilemma we face all the time in dealing with these sorts of situations.
The situations we face are life and death. These people are coming with incredible loads of disease—things we don't see in Canada—because of the poor nutrition, the poor preventative care they've had. They've had no fluoridated water. They have rampant cavities that infect nerves and cause abscesses in the tissues around.
The liabilities are more than just a case of someone coming in with a chipped crown. These are people who, if we don't treat them, are going to end up in the hospital. People die of dental infection. We don't realize that in this country, but in the countries these people come from, it's a common enough occurrence. Absolutely we can't let these people exit our offices without providing them treatment.
It's inappropriate to have to pre-authorize for a surgical extraction for someone coming in with a facial abscess. The kinds of things we're looking at are open-and-drain, and there's a fee code for that, but It's not covered here. That's a basic minimum service. If someone comes with a facial abscess, we want to be able to get them out of it. Giving them an antibiotic and a painkiller and sending them out is not good treatment. It is something our regulators would look at poorly and it goes beyond what our ethics would dictate.
We need to provide better care than what is provided here, and that care is being provided. Dentists are providing it at no cost, which makes it sound as though we're not making money. The fact of the matter is that the overhead in our office is about 70%. What ends up happening is that if it's $1,000 worth of work, we've paid $700 towards that and done it for free, so we're losing money.
It's something that dentists do all the time. We generally don't complain about it, but when the load is increased to this extent, it's beyond our capacity to accept those sorts of numbers.