What is the ADA's position on dental affordability?

The Australian Dental Association officially supports the expansion of Medicare to cover dental care, at least for vulnerable and low-income Australians. It has advocated for the Child Dental Benefits Schedule and has publicly acknowledged the affordability crisis through its own annual surveys. However, critics argue that the ADA's advocacy has not matched the urgency that the data — including its own data — demands.

Does the ADA set dental fees?

No. The ADA does not set, mandate, or regulate dental fees. Under Australian competition law, it is prohibited from doing so. The ADA publishes an annual 'Schedule of Dental Services and Glossary' which lists item numbers but does not specify prices. Individual practices set their own fees independently. This means there is no standard fee patients can benchmark against, and the gap between clinics can be substantial — a gap fill at one practice might cost $150; at another, $300.

What reforms would make dental care more affordable in Australia?

The most impactful reform would be including dental care in Medicare, at minimum for low-income adults, pensioners, and people with chronic conditions whose oral health directly affects their general health. Beyond that, meaningful improvements would include mandatory publication of benchmark fees so patients can make informed comparisons, standardisation of dental gap insurance modelled on the medical sector's gap cover framework, targeted rural dental workforce incentives, and stronger consumer protections for patients who experience complications from overseas dental treatment.

What the Australian Dental Association Should Do About Dental Affordability

Q: Why is Australian dentistry so expensive?

Australian dentistry is expensive primarily because over 85 per cent of dental care is privately funded, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Unlike GP visits, dental care sits almost entirely outside the Medicare system. Australians paid $7.6 billion out-of-pocket for dental care in 2022–23 (AIHW). Operating costs in Australia — wages, materials, equipment, commercial rents — are also genuinely high. But the lack of a public safety net is the central structural problem: it means patients who cannot afford care simply do without it.

The Australian Dental Association’s own data should be enough to generate a political crisis. In 2024, the ADA reported that 61 per cent of Australians had delayed dental treatment in the previous 12 months. Of those, 63 per cent cited cost as the reason. A separate ADA-cited survey found that 80 per cent of Australians struggle with the cost of dental care. Australians paid $7.6 billion out-of-pocket for dental treatment in 2022–23, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — in a system where over 85 per cent of dental care is privately funded.

These numbers describe a public health failure. The question is what the body best positioned to change it — the Australian Dental Association — should do next.

This is not an attack on the ADA, and it is not an attack on dentists. The structural problems in Australian dental care predate the current ADA leadership and are not of the profession’s making. But the ADA occupies a position of genuine institutional power: it sets clinical standards, trains dentists, shapes policy conversations, and speaks to governments with authority that no patient group can match. What it does with that power matters.

What the ADA Has Gotten Right

Credit where it is due. The ADA has done meaningful work in several areas.

Dental Health Week is a genuine public health campaign. Year after year, the ADA invests in awareness campaigns that reach Australians who might otherwise give little thought to oral hygiene, diet, and the link between dental health and systemic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This is not nothing.

CDBS advocacy has been consistent, if underpowered. The ADA has supported and publicly endorsed the Child Dental Benefits Schedule since its introduction. While the scheme’s $1,095 benefit limit over two years is widely acknowledged — including by the ADA itself — as insufficient for children with significant dental needs, the ADA’s vocal support helped establish and preserve the program against budget pressure.

Infection control standards are robust and actively maintained. Australia’s dental infection control framework — including sterilisation protocols, single-use instrument requirements, and water quality standards — is among the most rigorous in the world. The ADA’s role in establishing and updating these standards has made Australian dental care genuinely safer than in most countries. Patients who have had dental treatment overseas and returned to an Australian clinic often find this difference immediately apparent.

What the Data Actually Says

The ADA’s own survey data tells a story the organisation has acknowledged but not fully acted on.

When 61 per cent of Australians delay dental treatment because of cost — and up to 10,000 Australians travel overseas for dental care each year, many for procedures they cannot afford domestically — the system is not experiencing isolated stress. It is failing structurally.

The CDBS cap of $1,095 over two years means a child with moderate decay, requiring a combination of fillings, extractions, and preventive treatment, may exhaust their benefit entitlement before completing treatment. The scheme was not designed to cover complex cases, and the ADA knows this.

For adults without private health insurance — roughly one third of Australians — the only safety net is the public dental system, which carries waiting lists of up to three years in some states. For those with insurance, average out-of-pocket costs remain significant: the median out-of-pocket cost for a crown after insurance rebate was $786 (AIHW). The gap between what insurers pay and what dentists charge is not a minor inconvenience — it is a structural feature of a system that has never been adequately integrated.

Five Things the ADA Should Do or Advocate for More Forcefully

1. Push Harder for Universal Medicare Dental

The ADA supports Medicare dental expansion in principle. In practice, that support has not translated into the kind of sustained, high-visibility public campaign that the scale of the problem demands.

The immediate priority should be what most dental health economists agree is achievable: Medicare dental coverage for low-income adults, pensioners, and people living with chronic conditions — particularly diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer — where oral health has a direct and documented impact on systemic health outcomes. This is not a radical position. It is the position of the Grattan Institute, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, and most independent health policy experts.

The ADA should be the loudest voice in this conversation, not a cautious bystander. A sustained public campaign — television, social media, direct political engagement — of the kind that other health professional bodies have mounted would shift the political calculus.

2. Introduce Mandatory Fee Transparency

The ADA cannot set fees — competition law prevents it. But it can advocate for mandatory publication of benchmark fees in a standardised format, similar to the model that exists in some European jurisdictions.

Currently, patients have no reliable way to compare dental fees before booking. A practice might charge $150 for a gap fill; another charges $320 for the same item number. Without transparency, patients cannot make informed decisions, and market competition cannot function effectively.

The ADA should advocate for a government-mandated system requiring all practices to publish their fees for the most common item numbers. This would not cap fees, but it would create accountability and enable genuine comparison — benefiting patients and reinforcing trust in the profession.

3. Champion Gap Insurance Standardisation

In the medical sector, the gap cover framework enables patients to know in advance what they will pay out-of-pocket when they see a specialist. The system is imperfect, but it provides a structure that dental insurance largely lacks.

The ADA should work with health insurers and the government to develop a dental gap cover standard modelled on the medical gap framework — one that requires insurers to publish clear gap amounts for common procedures and incentivises dentists to participate in no-gap or known-gap arrangements for essential care. This would not require fee controls. It would require transparency and standardised agreement structures.

4. Strengthen Rural Dental Workforce Incentives

Dental care in regional and rural Australia is harder to access and often more expensive than in metropolitan areas. The supply of dental practitioners per capita is substantially lower outside capital cities, and recruitment is difficult because the commercial viability of rural practice is constrained by lower average incomes in regional communities.

The ADA should advocate forcefully for expanded rural dental workforce incentives — scholarships conditional on rural service, HECS debt forgiveness tied to years of rural practice, and incentives for established practitioners who relocate to underserved areas. The rural workforce problem is solvable. It requires political will and a professional body prepared to make the case consistently.

5. Regulate Overseas Dental Referrals — and Protect Patients Who Go Anyway

Up to 10,000 Australians travel overseas for dental treatment each year. This figure is not declining. When Australian patients can save $2,000–$4,000 on a single implant by travelling to Vietnam or Thailand — even after adding the cost of flights and accommodation — the financial incentive is real and the ADA is not going to argue people out of it.

What the ADA can do is establish a formal safety framework: a requirement that clinics providing pre-travel information or referrals to overseas providers supply patients with a standardised safety checklist covering minimum clinic requirements, implant brand considerations, documentation standards, and what to do if complications arise in Australia. The ADA should also work with the Australian Society of Implant Dentistry and the Dental Board of Australia to clarify the obligations of Australian dentists who manage complications from overseas treatment — currently, those obligations are ambiguous, and some dentists decline to treat such patients at all.

Why These Things Haven’t Happened

It would be dishonest not to address this directly.

The ADA represents dentists, and many dentists have legitimate concerns about some of these proposals. Fee transparency raises commercial sensitivity concerns. Medicare dental expansion would change the economics of the profession in ways that are difficult to predict — particularly if public funding creates price pressure that flows into private fees. Rural workforce incentives require dentists to consider relocating practices they have built in preferred locations.

These are not trivial concerns, and they explain why progress has been slow. Professional associations are consensus organisations, and the consensus of a profession with significant financial stakes in the status quo is not always aligned with the best interests of the public that profession serves.

This is a tension the ADA needs to name publicly and manage more actively. The profession’s long-term legitimacy — its claim to be a public health profession, not just a private commercial sector — depends on being seen to lead on these questions, not be dragged toward them.

What Patients Can Do Now

Dental reform moves slowly. In the meantime, patients facing affordability barriers have practical options worth knowing about.

Ask about payment plans. Most practices, including Townsville Dental Clinic, offer interest-free or low-interest payment plans through providers such as DentiCare or humm. Spreading a $3,000 treatment over 24 months at zero interest makes it significantly more manageable.

Use the Child Dental Benefits Schedule if eligible. Eligible children receive up to $1,095 over two years for basic dental services. Check your Medicare online account or ask your clinic to confirm eligibility.

Check your private health fund. Many Australians are unaware of their dental annual limit or have not claimed their full entitlement. Funds typically reset on 1 January, and unused limits do not roll over.

Support Medicare dental campaigns. Organisations including the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association and the Consumers Health Forum of Australia actively campaign for Medicare dental coverage. Public awareness and political pressure are what ultimately move reform.

Ask your dentist about the most cost-effective treatment sequence. When the full treatment plan is unaffordable immediately, most dentists can prioritise urgent items and stage treatment over time in a way that protects oral health without requiring everything to be done at once.

A System That Can Do Better

The ADA is not the villain of the dental affordability story. The villain — if there must be one — is a structural gap between a Medicare system that treats the mouth as separate from the body, and a private dental sector that cannot, on its own, serve everyone who needs care.

But the ADA has more influence over that story than it has exercised. The data it collects, the platform it commands, and the trust governments place in its clinical authority give it the tools to push harder than it has. The profession deserves a peak body that leads with the same conviction on affordability that it brings to infection control or fluoridation. Patients are waiting for it.

Townsville Dental Clinic offers transparent fee information, staged payment plans, and bulk-billing under the Child Dental Benefits Schedule for eligible patients. Contact our team to discuss your treatment options.