12-02-2025
Addressing the dental care shortage in rural New Mexico
Feb. 11—Natasha McDonald wants to return home following the completion of her dental hygienist program in April, providing desperately needed care to her home city of 6,000 people.
"I'm from a rural area, so I'm going back to a rural area," said McDonald, who's from Raton.
Lack of accessible health care and a shortage of workers has affected New Mexico, particularly rural communities, and dental is no exception. The number of dentists in New Mexico per 100,000 people is 48.4 — below the national average of 60.84, according to Touro College of Dental Medicine.
With providers retiring, moving to larger cities for different opportunities and communities struggling with financial barriers, patients are forced to drive longer distances or forego dental care altogether. A report from Healthcare Value Hub revealed that 30% of New Mexicans skipped important dental procedures in 2024 due to financial restrictions — a big concern of dental professionals.
"A lot of people ... just don't have insurance and think, 'Well if I can't afford it, I'm just not going to do it,'" said Brittany Jaramillo, a third-semester Pima student who plans to return to Belen as a rural hygienist.
There have been continued efforts to keep dental students and workers within the state, including the state's first dental school and incentives like the Rural Health Care Practitioner Tax Credit Program, which offers rural dentists a $5,000 tax credit and rural dental hygienists a $3,000 tax credit each year.
"In order to attract anybody to rural areas, there has to be additional incentives of some kind, and that's why the state has the rural tax credit," said Tom Schripsema, executive director of the New Mexico Dental Association.
One of the biggest issues among rural providers is the Medicaid process for dental patients, which can make it more expensive for practitioners to see a patient compared to what they earn and can limit what type of work they can do.
One-third of dentists accept Medicaid, according to the New Mexico Dental Therapist Coalition. In New Mexico, 784,300 people were enrolled in Medicaid as of August 2024, according to health research company KFF.
"When you're in a small town where the marketplace is small and half of the patients are on Medicaid, it's a smaller pool of patients to draw from if you can't get revenue or income from Medicaid," Schripsema said.
Melissa Plese, dental hygiene program director at Pima, suggested the separation of health care and dental insurance plays a role in the lack of care for New Mexicans.
"Dental insurance has not changed with the times. I think it all comes down to insurance and the fact that health care and dental are separate.
"And when you look at the cost of dentistry, like a dental chair and an operatory room, the price it costs to actually output a clinic versus what you're getting charged is not equitable," Plese said.
One way to improve the dental workforce would be to bolster the number of traveling dentists and dental hygienists , said Plese.
However, licensing for dentistry in New Mexico does not allow for compact licenses — licenses that allow providers to practice in other states.
However, dental students at Pima believe because there is such a shortage of dental providers across the state, there are more opportunities for newly graduated students.
The projected job growth for all dentistry workers has increased between 7-9% nationwide, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
The industry is calling on state legislators to improve access to jobs and tax benefits. House Bill 15 would appropriate money to recruitment programs to address the health care shortage, and House Bill 226 seeks to increase the rural tax credit from $3,000 to $9,000 for dental hygienists and $5000 to $15,000 for dentists.
Dental care is an essential service, McDonald said, "but a lot of people aren't willing to give up everything else to go work in a small town, and it's not compensated as much as an office in Albuquerque."
