Legislation

A significant amount of activity is underway in the U.S. Congress focused on adding dental, vision and hearing benefits to the Medicare program, and the proposals are moving quickly. This communication from CDA supplements what the ADA, media and other sources have shared to give members background and context for the current activity and clarify some common misunderstandings.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Oct. 8 signed CDA-sponsored legislation that gives California dentists permanent authority to provide influenza and COVID-19 vaccines and obtain the required state registration to process rapid COVID-19 tests in the dental office.

Student loan borrowers in California have new protections against lenders’ and servicers’ unfair, deceptive and predatory practices under the state’s new Student Borrower Bill of Rights. 
 

COVID-19’s impact on dentistry remains a top advocacy priority for CDA, and a new bill that CDA is co-sponsoring with the California Medical Association would help to safeguard health care providers’ financial stability during future state emergencies like the current pandemic.

An expedited licensure application review process is now available for individuals in specific categories who apply for a professional license through California licensing boards, including dentists, RDAs and RDAEFs who apply for licensure through the Dental Board of California. 

Very small businesses, including dental practices with just five or more employees, will soon be subject to the California Family Rights Act’s requirement to provide protected unpaid family leave to their employees.

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. 

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.
 

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.