Dental Care, Culture of Urgency, and Fran Drescher
Americans have gum disease!, false urgency at work, and I'm fangirling for Fran
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We all have gum disease. We need real dental insurance.
Did you know that 50% of American adults over the age of 30 have gum disease? This is a shocking statistic. But if you think about it, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Dental and vision care is left out of general health insurance plans in the United States. While this news headline is from 2022, so not really the “latest” in employment news, it only recently came across my radar–so it’s news to me and probably news to you too.
America is far from alone in this problem. When it comes to dental insurance, only 5 countries cover the full costs of dental care (Austria, Mexico, Poland, Spain, and Turkey. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around half of the world’s population has untreated oral diseases.
So why do our mouth bones not get the same medical coverage that our other bones get? Why do people suffer painful dental problems when we have all the resources we need to prevent them in the first place?
In America, we’ve separate general health insurance from dental and vision health coverage. This is by design. Under the Affordable Care Act, which helps millions of Americans access health insurance, dental care is not listed as one of the 10 essential health benefits that insurance providers must cover.
There are a couple of reasons why we don’t prioritize dental insurance as much as we should:
There’s an assumption that dental problems are not life threatening compared to other bodily ailments. So instead of trying to solve both general and dental health, we’ve pushed oral care to the side for now. Considering how many Americans don’t have any health insurance at all, dental may be the least of their concerns.
Dental schools, degrees, and practices are not part of the overall medical infrastructure. Dentistry is its own field and is regulated by state boards of dentistry. Dental lobbyists also fight against plans to add dental coverage to insurance plans like Medicare.
Health insurance companies do not want to pay for dental treatments. They can be costly and usually aren’t life threatening. American insurance companies aren’t big on covering preventative care in general.
We have plenty of evidence that dental health is strongly linked to the health of the rest of our bodies. If you have gum disease (also called periodontal disease), you are at 2 to 3 times more risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. Oral infections can also lead to lung disease, premature births and, potentially diabetes.
We’ve known this since 2000 when Surgeon General David Satcher released a report titled Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General. The report says that oral health is essential to general health. Americans experience pain, complications, and financial or social costs that diminish their quality of life due to dental health problems.
So how do American voters feel about dental coverage? Well, when democrats were pushing through a reconciliation bill in 2021, Americans across political parties said their number one priority was to add dental and vision benefits to Medicare. It wasn’t included in the final version of the bill.
The takeaway here? If you currently have dental coverage through your employer or government issued insurance policy, make use of it ASAP! There’s a good chance you have untreated gum disease.
Food for Thought
Are you trapped in a culture of urgency?
Does your boss always seem to have a “fire to put out” that involves you dropping everything to work on something that may not actually be part of your job? Are you low key anxious that you can’t get everything done that’s demanded of you each day? Are you high key anxious that all of your deadlines are unreasonable?
Welcome to the culture of urgency. In this world, your boss’ boss demands a report detailing your team’s activity by the end of the day–and then you never hear about it again. Sometimes, a company culture of urgency is due to bad time management by leaders.
Other times it's intentional. Some management teams associate urgency with productivity. If things are fast paced, then tasks are being completed. Perhaps they can feel proud of being an in-demand team or department. Perhaps understaffing, and overworking, helps them hit their budget goals.
I tried to research this concept but most of the articles I found online were from HR people and focused on how to walk the line between too little and too much urgency in the office. It feels like they’re pitching a social experiment about how to herd your employees in just the right way.
When managers rely on a culture of urgency, rather than stepping in and helping their teams prioritize for the benefit of their customers, the team, and the company, they absolve themselves of making tough decisions. They just pass the claimed emergency on to their people.
Employees, on the other hand, become overworked, burnt out, anxious, and resentful. People generally want to do the job they were hired for and constant fire fighting in the office frustrates our ability to excel in our roles. We’re forced to do last minute busy work for a leader who didn’t manage their own time well enough.
In my personal experience, I worked at a company that understaffed our team and constantly asked for excel spreadsheets, by the end of the day, that we had to fill out by copying and pasting data from our customer relationship management (CRM) system. A system which our bosses had full access to and could pull a report from on their own.
The popular phrase rings true: when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. When people can’t trust their managers to prioritize tasks, actual productivity declines. We focus on tasks that are the most “visible” to management, rather than our actual job responsibilities.
Listen, most of us aren’t saving lives. If an excel report is sent today, tomorrow, or never, it’s not going to make a big difference to anyone. If inventory isn’t updated tonight for a retail store, perhaps a few people will be inconvenienced. There’s simply no need for so much urgency.
The HR people who write about a culture of urgency suggest setting boundaries with your managers. Don’t reply to every email or phone call. Say no sometimes. Sounds simple but unfortunately, we might provoke the ire of our boss. Changes to company culture comes from the top. There has to be a level of compassion (and, perhaps, a better grip on reality) from the people that own and run the company.
The Lighter(ish) side of Working
Welcome back to the world stage Fran Drescher!
I am fangirling HARD over Fran Drescher right now. If you don’t know who she is, she co-created and played the title role on the 90’s TV show The Nanny. Her Queens, New York accent and iconic laugh were famous.
Today, she’s the president of SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. She’s been negotiating with AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, made up of Hollywood studio execs, to improve actors' contracts.
These negotiations failed and SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA (Writers Guild of America) on strike on July 14th. Which is no surprise when news articles and interviews show how little respect these leaders have for the people actually creating their products.
Rumors have arisen that the AMPTP is hoping to “break the WGA” by starving them out. Hoping that they run out of money and lose their apartments and homes so that they come back to the negotiating table more willing to accept whatever studio execs want to offer.
Bog Iger, CEO of Disney, said in a recent interview:
“There’s a level of expectation that they [SAG-AFTRA] have, that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
Now, getting back to my home girl Fran Drescher. If you haven’t watched her speech announcing the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike, PLEASE watch it now. Her fantastic and straightforward explanation of what went wrong in these negotiations is eye opening.
“I went in earnest thinking we could avert a strike… So it came with great sadness that we came to this crossroads. We had no voice. We are the victims here. I am shocked by the way these people, who we have been in business with, are treating us. I can not believe it, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty when they give hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.”
“At some point you have to say no, we’re not going to take this anymore. You people are crazy. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? There was nothing there, it was insulting. We aren’t going to make incremental changes to a contract that no longer honors what is happening. What are we doing? Moving around furniture on the Titanic? It's crazy.”
“Shame on them, they stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment… The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI. This is a moment of history, a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble.”
I hope that the unions that are standing up to corporate interests right now can make a difference. Because most people are not in unions and need a champion to speak up. Fran ended her speech, to applause, with the real crux of today’s problems between employers and workers: “you share the wealth, because you can not exist without us.”