COMMENTARY: A night at the opera with bad teeth
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By Anna-Leena Pyykkönen
Dental care is something of a sore point, and not just in Helsinki.
On the Metro pages of this paper*, on February 20th, there was an article by this writer, and an accompanying commentary piece, about the long lines for the dental treatment provided by the City of Helsinki. It struck a chord, and feedback aplenty came in, from places as far afield as Northern Karelia and even Australia.
There were a number of counter-claims to the commentary, which wrote about how the Helsinki residents are being shafted, and about resigned, submissive patients who do not even try to get treatment in the public sector.
A dentist from a town close to the eastern border wrote in to say "Shame on you, Helsingians!"
"Helsinki has many good things, and it also has the Opera, theatres, orchestras, government offices, and corporate headquarters. What more should there be? About the only thing that seems to be missing [from the city] is a sense of contentment. I suppose in the name of equality that really ought to be shared out equally across the country. But it certainly doesn't fit in the capital."
The writer would seem to believe that people in the Greater Helsinki area should not demand comprehensive municipal health services, because there is an abundance of private-sector medicine to be had, and people have the money to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Without belittling the rural impoverished in the least, I would point out that well-being is not exactly evenly shared out even here. There are at least enough poor people in Helsinki to populate a few small provincial towns. There are as many unemployed persons in Helsinki as there are residents of Savonlinna. Besides which, there is no paragraph in the law-books that decrees that municipal dental care should be provided only to those who live in remote areas.
The dentist reminds us of the many and varied cultural services enjoyed by residents of the capital, which are not available to those living out on the nation's peripheries. However, bread and circuses do not help much with the toothache, though arguably they might cheer up our mental health. Then again, the seriously marginalised who might need that are seldom seen at the National Opera.
Let us imagine for a moment that a Helsinki citizen might choose whether to take state or municipal subsidies in the form of artistic pleasures or by going to get their teeth seen to.
Last year, the society provided funding of EUR 123.00 for each opera ticket sold, with EUR 15.00 of this coming in the form of support from neighbouring communities. At the same time, the City of Helsinki made available an average of EUR 75.00 to support each visit to the dentist.
If I could choose, I would prefer to take a voucher for the dentist rather than for a night at the opera, but it is a matter of taste. Quite the nicest state of affairs, naturally, would be to be able to get to see the opera inexpensively and with a decent set of teeth.
Some feisty feedback came from one doctor in the private sector after I claimed that the woman next door had managed some time ago to get her tooth fixed up "for a few tens of euros". What I should have written, in the doctor's view, was that municipal dental care costs the patient half as much as if one goes private.
It is perfectly true that one cannot get one's entire set of pearly-whites sorted out for twenty euros, but you can get a filling done for that money: the price is EUR 18-29.
Where the respondents were unanimous was in saying that the entire dental health system is on its uppers and does not represent what the original aims for it were.
One social critic from back in the sixties rang up and said that dental care is an example of the amateurish fiddlings of a degenerate municipal bureaucracy. The politicians eat out of their hand and protect their positions. Even the media, he claimed, are toothless and do not bellow loudly enough or long enough about the injustices they observe.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.3.2006
The writer is a journalist on the Helsingin Sanomat Metro desk.
*Note: the original articles referred to were not included in the International Edition's selection of stories on February 20th. The main article pointed to the current situation in Helsinki, where the waiting-times for non-urgent dental care, as provided by the city, have stretched to roughly a year or more. Some 9,000 people are in the queue. Treatment for acute problems does not face the same problems.
ANNA-LEENA PYYKKÖNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anna-leena.pyykkonen@hs.fi
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| 7.3.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: A night at the opera with bad teeth
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