DREDAY said:
i still have not been able to access the link
Here it is:
REVIEWJOURNAL.COM
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Dental school seen as 'burden'
Lawmakers question further funding of UNLV program
By K.C. HOWARD
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Several lawmakers want to disband UNLV's dental school despite concerns that such a move would deprive low-income residents of oral health care.
"I just think we need to revisit the whole issue," Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani said Wednesday. "I think at this point it (the dental school) has become a burden on the state."
The dental school budget this year is $26.3 million. Of that, only $4.5 million is drawn from the state's general fund, UNLV President Carol Harter told a legislative finance committee Wednesday.
"The operation is a very large operation with the vast amount of the dollars coming from nonstate sources," Harter said. Clinic revenue funds much of the budget, and tuition is fairly high at $15,000 a year for Nevada residents, she said.
But Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, said state support will rise to $7.5 million next year and $7.7 million the following year, according to Gov. Kenny Guinn's proposed budget.
And with interim Chancellor Jim Rogers asking for hundreds of millions more than proposed in the governor's budget, extracting the dental school is becoming more appealing to lawmakers.
The state's lone dental school opened in fall 2002. Since then, the school has offered oral health care and education to about 150,000 people statewide, said Patrick Ferrillo, the school's dean. It has provided 12,000 students with dental education, screened 30,000 students for oral cancer and served about 90,000 Medicaid patients, he said.
But Giunchigliani said the Medicaid dollars that help fund the school could go to neighborhood dental clinics in underserved valley communities. "You don't need a school as a front for those clinics," she said in an interview.
Ferrillo noted that the school helps address the state's lagging ratio of dentists to residents. The 37 dentists per 100,000 people in Nevada is below the national average of 57 dentists per 100,000 residents, he said.
This fall, the school will have 300 students, Ferrillo said. He added that if UNLV's school closed, it would be difficult to find space for Nevada's dental students in the nation's other 56 dental schools.
But Las Vegas Republican Sens. Bob Beers and Sandra Tiffany said there is no shortage of dentists.
"It's hard to go two blocks in Summerlin and Green Valley and not see two or three," Beers said. "Meanwhile, we've got a car mechanics program at CCSN that's languishing for less than half of what we're spending on the dental school and a number of other higher education priorities that strike me as more important."
Both senators said resources devoted to the dental school would be better spent expanding the auto technology training program at the Community College of Southern Nevada, which needs $10 million for a new facility to train auto mechanics. The governor did not include the project in his proposed budget.
"There is a huge appetite for the auto technology training facility," said Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas.
But Maury Astley, Nevada Dental Association executive director, said there's a dentist distribution problem in Southern Nevada. Dentists congregate in Summerlin and Green Valley instead of lower-income areas.
Review-Journal writer Sean Whaley contributed to this report.
