Or, perhaps he has recently read Kipling’s “If” and taken it to heart? Remember, everyone can change! Time - and the tone and content of Greg’s next few posts - will tell the tale!
I’m still noodling over Greg’s question. We all know that preventive care is more cost-effective in the long run. I’m not sure this applies well to dentistry, but in general I think it’s true. We already supply, via taxes, a safety net to cover emergency room visits, which is a level of compassionate taxation that I have no problem with.

Faith-based initiatives and other charity initiatives - supported by voluntary donation, not government force - could alleviate much suffering and stress. But the truth is, their effectiveness is marginal. If we believe the poor should not be abandoned, and we abhor government force where it isn’t necessary, it seems to me we should have a much stronger SYSTEM in place for guaranteeing a widespread and effective use of charity organizations. But we don’t have that. In its absence, the compassionate who want to DO something are left only with the option of government force to accomplish their goals. I wish we were providing a more effective alternative than that, so they wouldn’t have to turn to socialism to accomplish their compassionate goals.

A broken clock is right twice a day. Not even crazy people are crazy all the time. Nature produces camouflage for predators to aid in their hunt.

Answering Greg is not simple. His question delves right to the very heart of liberal vs conservative solutions to problems. A definitive answer would take pages. Here’s my short attempt:

Supplying free dentistry requires complete government control, usually via increased taxes which are redistributed to provide the service. If this is done for free dentistry, you can be certain it would be done for many, many other services. We would become a socialist society. What Greg is advocating is precisely a socialist society: forced redistribution of all the means that are necessary to provide for all the needs.

It never has worked, and it never will work.

It doesn’t work for three reasons.

The first is basic human nature. No one works as hard for “society” as they do for themselves and those they love, and those they value. The second is corruption. When such vast power is centralized, vast corruption inevitably follows. Finally, the third reason is inefficiency. Government control delivers results extremely poorly. You could argue that at least it is fair: EVERYONE is served equally poorly.

I’ll close by whining about a pet peeve: When I order books and cds from Amazon, I get them within one week to ten days. Guaranteed. I have ordered a CD from PBS (because PBS has sole control of this particular item.) I have been waiting for four weeks, and so far, still no CD. Just another example of the above points I tried to make, that government funding, freed from market pressures, simply produces inferior results, time and time again.

I gather you understood that part of this post was just the humor of British dentistry, which some consider an oxymoron.

But I was making a point that government managed care is no panacea. It is true that here, some people have no dental care. (Although we always got our care at the dental school when I was growing up. It was a slow way to do it, but it was cheap. So there are alternatives for those who live in most urban areas.) Britain exemplifies the problem of managed care, which is that everyone gets lousy care, which is not necessarily much better than a situation in which most get good care and some get limited or no care.