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CDA this week took a support position on legislation that would help to protect public health officers in California from threats and attacks by requiring that their personal information be kept confidential. 
Sen. Richard Pan, who is also a practicing pediatrician, introduced Senate Bill 483 in response to the escalating personal threats made against public health officers throughout the state.

The state Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom reached an agreement yesterday on a balanced state budget for 2020-21 fiscal year that preserves critical safety net health care funding in the Medi-Cal dental (Denti-Cal) program.

Now that Gov. Newsom has eased the statewide stay-at-home order and dentists are beginning to return to practice, CDA's Grassroots Advocacy Days have resumed. In the last weeks, dentists from four component dental societies met with their local legislators or legislative staff through Zoom, the videoconferencing platform.
 

President Trump on Friday, March 27, signed into law the third legislative relief package developed by lawmakers to respond to the economic crisis created by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (HR 748), also known as the CARES Act, is a nearly $2 trillion "Wartime" stimulus intended to protect employers, workers and businesses. CDA is extremely pleased that the legislation appears to give dentists more of the kind of support they need to maintain their practices and protect themselves and their employees.

CDA-sponsored legislation that further increases dental plan transparency became law on Jan. 1. AB 954 requires dental plans to be more transparent about the leasing of dental networks. The new law will reduce patient and dentist confusion caused by the increasing number of plans leasing their networks to other payers, many times unbeknownst to the enrollee or contracted dentist(s). The law took effect for contracts entered into on or after Jan. 1, 2020.

Direct-to-consumer orthodontic patients will gain new protections when CDA-supported Assembly Bill 1519 becomes the law in January 2020. The first of its kind in the nation, the new law will protect patients from DTC orthodontic companies that are putting profits before patients by taking potentially unsafe shortcuts to the accepted standards of care.

When performing procedures on exposed dental pulp, water or other methods used for irrigation must be “sterile or contain recognized disinfecting or antibacterial properties,” according to a new requirement that all licensed dentists in California must follow beginning Jan. 1, 2019.

Many bills were introduced over the past year to combat the opioid epidemic in California, as CDA previously reported. Here is an overview of CDA-supported legislation in the areas of e-prescribing, informed consent, interstate data sharing and prescription-pad requirements, that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September and how these bills will affect the practice of dentistry.

More than 7 million adults enrolled in Denti-Cal, California’s Medicaid dental program, will have a fully restored package of dental benefits in 2018. The adult benefit package was drastically cut in 2009 due to the state budget crisis and was partially restored in May 2014. The restoration of the adult dental benefit services is a result of legislative action taken during the 2017-18 budget process.