I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
New Mexico has fewer dentists per capita than all but one state, and one in five of its residents is uninsured, but the state still managed to rank as one of six national leaders in the area of dental care for its children, according to a new report by the Pew Center on the States.
Here are a few reasons why New Mexico is performing so well, according to a fact sheet in the report for New Mexico:
New Mexico is the only state in the West that has met the goal for water fluoridation, with 77 percent of its residents on community systems receiving optimally fluoridated water. The state’s Medicaid program reimburses dentists at a level that exceeds the national average, and has outperformed most other states in utilization: In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, nearly 48 percent of Medicaid-enrolled children received dental care.
But it’s not all good news –the state ranks 49th among dentists per capita and “would need at least 100 dentists to meet the needs of its unserved residents,” the fact sheet shows.
The state also “falls short of the national average in terms of prevalence of school-based sealant programs, and it has yet to authorize a new primary care dental provider.”
But with nearly half its children receiving dental care, New Mexico outperformed many other states in dental coverage. The Pew study found that one in five children in the United States — or about 17 million kids between the ages of 1 and 18 — go without dental care, according to a summary of the report.
New Mexico joined Connecticut, Iowa, South Carolina, Maryland and Rhode Island as national leaders in the area of children’s dental health.
The nine states that ranked the poorest were Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming, the report summary shows.
