In addition to funding California’s COVID-19 recovery and vaccination efforts and proposing several billion dollars to tackle homelessness and help schools reopen, the state budget proposal released Jan. 8 supports improvements in oral health care delivery and access to dental services.

With several promising vaccines for the new coronavirus in various stages of testing, California is developing its own vaccination plan for the state’s population. CDA is asking the state to revise its distribution plan to standardize the list of essential health care workers for the purpose of phase-1 distribution and to include oral health care providers on that list.

The ADA in October released a COVID-19 and Lab Testing Requirements Toolkit to assist dentists preparing to implement COVID-19 testing as part of the patient screening process. To assist members with California-specific requirements, CDA’s Clinical Care Workgroup has released additional guidance in the form of a new toolkit resource.

The Department of Consumer Affairs on Oct. 22 issued a fourth C.E. extension waiver, giving all California-licensed dental professionals whose active licenses expire between March 31 and Dec. 31 until April 22, 2021, to meet license renewal requirements.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara last Wednesday issued a notice to California health insurance and specialized health insurance companies, including 55 dental benefits companies, requesting that they “provide their policyholders with a partial premium refund no later than December 31, 2020.

Dental assistants and dental hygienists in California who have not been able to complete their RDA and RDH programs and therefore take the required examinations and obtain their licenses due to COVID-19 restrictions now have additional time to satisfy the exam requirements.

BinaxNow received an emergency use authorization from the FDA, becoming the latest rapid and inexpensive antigen test to be preliminarily approved for wide use. But tests that have received the authorization in recent weeks are not advanced enough to enable dentists to definitively identify patients with or without COVID-19.

Two bills that will assist dental practice owners impacted by the pandemic became law last week with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. One new law will protect PPP loan recipients from having to pay potentially thousands in unexpected state income tax on their forgiven PPP loans. 

Despite Big Tobacco’s multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to stop legislation that would ban the sale of flavored tobacco products in California, the Legislature passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly signed Senate Bill 793 into law last Friday.