Virginia Public Dental Access Project

Virginia's Medicaid dental access crisis, mapped and measured.

Independent public-interest research documenting where Medicaid dental coverage isn't reaching people, and why. Built to inform the policy that can fix it.

See the dashboardFind a Medicaid dentist
  • Independent research
  • Non-partisan
  • Virginia-focused
73%
of Virginia dentists treated zero Medicaid patients in 2022.
DMAS Access Report, 2022. The most recent public measure, predating both rate increases.

Not because dentists refused. Virginia's reimbursement rates had not changed since 2005, while the cost of running a practice rose about 60% over the same period.

Rate freeze: DMAS Access Report, 2022 · 60%: Virginia Dental Association, June 2022

This counts the full licensed workforce, which includes specialists, academics, and part-time practitioners. Measuring participation properly, by general dentists and by claim volume, is one of the things the study would fix.

84%
of Virginia's 133 localities are designated federal dental shortage areas.
HRSA BCD HPSA, 2026
296
More dentists Virginia needs to lift its federal dental shortage designations.
KFF analysis of HRSA data, December 2025
178

Federal dental shortage area designations in Virginia, covering 2,702,376 people, with 52.96% of need met.

KFF, as of December 31, 2025

13

Virginia localities with fewer than one full-time-equivalent dentist. Eight of those have none at all.

Virginia Health Catalyst, Oral Health Workforce Gap Assessment, 2023

1,014

Medicaid and FAMIS members per participating dentist statewide, August 2022.

DMAS Access Report, 2022

1,782

Dentists participating in the Medicaid dental program in FY2022, down from a peak of 1,929 in FY2018. The most recent count DMAS has published.

DMAS Access Report, 2022

17%

Share of newly eligible adults who received any dental treatment in the first year of the adult benefit. 158,237 of 924,000.

Virginia Dental Association, June 2022

Reimbursement

What Virginia has done so far

  1. 2005–2022Rates frozenNo increase for seventeen years.
  2. July 2022+30%Backed by $116 million
  3. July 2024+3%

Roughly 34% compounded since 2022. After the 2022 increase, dentists joined the network at about 23 per month, up from about 15 before it. Reimbursement is demonstrably the lever. What has never been measured is what delivering this care costs a Virginia practice.

A further 7% increase was requested for July 2025 and was not funded.

Rate freeze and 2022 increase: DMAS Access Report, 2022 · $116 million: Associated Press / Washington Post, July 3, 2022 · 2024 increase: 2024 Appropriation Act, Item 288 · 2025 request, not funded: Item 288 #33h, 2025 Session (see sources) · Network growth: Virginia Mercury, March 2023

2020 data · before Virginia's rate increases

How Virginia compares

Medicaid dental reimbursement as a share of private insurance reimbursement.

2020Virginia, child dental services63.7%
2020Virginia, adult dental servicesNot reportedVirginia had no comprehensive adult dental benefit until July 2021
2020National average, child61.4%Down from 61.9% in 2017
2020Range across states27.8% – 104.8%Minnesota (27.8%) to Kentucky (104.8%)

ADA Health Policy Institute, “Reimbursement Rates for Child and Adult Dental Services in Medicaid by State,” 2020 data

These figures predate Virginia's 2022 and 2024 rate increases. No current, public measure of where Virginia's fee schedule now sits relative to commercial rates has been published. That gap is the core of the case for a state study.

The cost of doing nothing

Care that doesn't happen in a dental chair ends up in the emergency room.

Patients who cannot find a participating dentist end up in hospital emergency departments, where they receive antibiotics and pain medication but no dental treatment, and then return. The American Dental Association estimates that moving this care out of emergency departments and into dental offices could save the health system $2.7 billion annually nationwide.

American Dental Association, Medicaid Dental Benefit Act materials

What we publish

Three tools, one mission

Each project documents a piece of the access crisis — and together they form the evidence base for policy reform.

Project I

Medicaid Dental Access

An interactive map of provider participation, reimbursement, and access gaps across all 133 Virginia localities.

Open dashboard
Project II

Find a Medicaid Dentist

A ZIP code search for Virginia dentists accepting Cardinal Care Smiles, plus an anonymous check on whether the state's directory listings are accurate.

Search by ZIP
Project III

National Policy Tracker

A comparative database of state-level Medicaid dental legislation: reimbursement rates, bill status, participation outcomes.

Open tracker

About

Coverage you can't use is paper coverage.

Over 2 million Virginians are covered by Medicaid. Their dental benefit is called Cardinal Care Smiles (it used to be called Smiles For Children), and a company called DentaQuest runs it for the state. Children through age 20 have had dental coverage since 2005, pregnant members since 2015, and adults have had full dental coverage since July 1, 2021.

Most of Medicaid is run by private health plans, but dental is kept separate. The state pays dentists directly, at prices it sets itself. That means what Virginia pays dentists is a budget decision, made by the legislature — not a regulation buried in a rulebook.

Coverage on paper only matters if there's a dentist who accepts it. Virginia Public Dental Access Project exists to document where there isn't — locality by locality, year by year — and to use that evidence to push for policy that closes the gap.

Enrollment: Virginia Health Catalyst, 2023

Founded by Zubair Mahedavi, a University of Virginia undergraduate (Political and Social Thought, pre-dental) researching Virginia Medicaid dental policy.

Start here

See where the gap is — and what it will take to close it.

Explore the dashboardCompare state policy