Dental Clinic Opens To Uninsured Patients

By Jeremy Hunt

HARRISONBURG - Marion Messmer was close to retiring from dentistry earlier this year, but then she heard about the Harrisonburg Rockingham Dental Clinic.

"I didn't have any intention of doing this," said Messmer, who recently moved to Harrisonburg after practicing dentistry for 20 years in the Arlington area. "Once I learned about this, I thought, ‘You know, they really need help with this.'"

The dental clinic needed a professional to get the program started, and Messmer took the job.

The Harrisonburg Rockingham Dental Clinic began seeing uninsured patients Monday.

It was formed by the Harrisonburg Rockingham Free Clinic, located at 24 W. Water St., to provide low-cost dental care to uninsured and Medicaid patients.

The dental clinic, which operates in the same building as the free clinic, is open three days a week from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., alternating between a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday schedule and a Wednesday-Thursday-Friday schedule.

A basic dental care visit costs $30. For major dental work, such as root canals and crowns, the clinic will refer patients to local dentists at reduced costs, said Rich Sider, executive director of the free clinic.

To qualify for dental service, patients must be residents of either Harrisonburg or Rockingham County, have no dental insurance, and earn up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The poverty level is an annual income of $10,400 for one person and $21,200 for a family of four.

The dental clinic is waiting for Medicaid approval to begin seeing those patients, including uninsured children, Sider said.

The free clinic estimates that 60 percent of Medicaid recipients in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County don't have access to dental care, and most of them are children.

In April, the clinic estimated about 300 of the 900 people it treats each year have some kind of dental problem.

Sider said the dental clinic should be approved for Medicaid around the end of the month.

The staff consists of Messmer and two assistants, but as the program develops, the clinic will hire more people, Sider said.

The clinic will eventually be open five days a week as the staff grows, he said.

Although she is the only dentist on staff, Messmer said she has a lot of support from others in the community.

"I don't feel like I'm in this by myself," she said. "There are people who will be there to assist me."

Messmer said uninsured people are likely to ignore problems until they're no longer tolerable, but that's something she wants to change with her work at the clinic.

"There's gonna be a lot of difficult work here," she said. "What I want to try to do is focus on prevention ... and saving your teeth and how."

Contact Jeremy Hunt at 574-6273 or jhunt@dnronline.com