If you’re a veteran, the VA won’t help cover your pearly whites unless you fit into some very specific criteria.

Which means it is bizarrely difficult for many veterans to find affordable dental care.

The Department of Veterans Affairs helps veterans with a lot of medical insurance issues. However, veterans
only qualify for full VA dental benefits under several specific conditions, including being 100% disabled or a former prisoner of war, or if they developed a dental issue while they were serving.


As a result, veterans struggle to find dental care that they can actually pay for.

And without access to dental care, veterans face life-threatening health risks like periodontal disease, which can lead to stroke or heart attack.

This is where the Mouth Mobile van comes in.

The van, which is run by Aspen Dental, is basically what it sounds like a mobile dental office. It’s a large van that travels through about 30 states each year, giving veterans free dental care.

The company started this initiative as part of its Healthy Mouth Movement, which was launched last year with the goal of
reaching the 150 million Americans who are unable to visit the dentist because of high cost, lack of time, or lack of dental professionals nearby.

In 2014, the Mobile Mouth van treated almost 3,000 patients for free. When the volunteer dentists noticed how many of those patients were veterans without access to affordable dental care, they decided to make providing veterans with dental care their exclusive focus for 2015.


Aspen Dental has more than 500 offices around the country but has helped veterans in immeasurable ways thanks to the Mouth Mobile van.

Veteran William Bell, who couldn’t get the VA to cover his costs, has Mouth Mobile to thank for his new set of teeth. According
to The Huffington Post, when Bell arrived at the Mouth Mobile clinic, the volunteer dentist had to extract 19 of his 20 remaining teeth, which had deteriorated from severe periodontal disease.

Not only did Aspen Dental restore Bell to good dental health, they also provided him with dentures. The whole procedure and dentures would have cost him around $6,000, which he would not have been able to afford.

GIF via Aspen Dental/YouTube.

But it’s not only Bell who Aspen Dental has helped. In September 2015, race car driver and Aspen Dental spokesperson Danica Patrick helped honor 2,200 veterans at the Chicagoland Speedway.

It’s kind of weird that dental care is treated separately from the rest of our health care.

Dental care is so important not only to one’s overall health but to our livelihoods, too. Especially in fields where interacting face-to-face with others is a regular part of the job, having clean, healthy teeth can be a huge advantage. Once Mouth Mobile restored Bell’s teeth and provided him with a set of dentures, he had the confidence to apply for a job at the Arkansas Forestry Commission.

But
dentistry is still often treated more as a “craft” than a medically necessary field, a centuries-old attitude that still remains today, which is why there’s often a lack of availability in dental insurance.

Even the Affordable Care Act didn’t initially include dental coverage, making such care unaffordable for many Americans. And a 2014 research brief from the American Dental Association found lack of income and insurance are the chief barriers to accessing dental care.

Obamacare
still only extends dental coverage to children, not adults.

Mouth Mobile and similar initiatives are only a first step in solving this problem not just for veterans, but for everyone.


Only when we realize that dental care is essential to our health and only when we provide better insurance coverage for it will we begin to make progress in ensuring everyone has the same access to dental care.

See Danica Patrick and Aspen Dental honor 2,200 veterans in the video below:

Read more: http://www.upworthy.com/the-va-doesnt-cover-dental-care-for-all-veterans-so-these-dentists-are-picking-up-the-slack?c=tpstream

MARTINS FERRY, Ohio — Coal miners upset with the Obama administration’s policies on energy protested Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign rally here.

More than 100 coal miners and tea party activists stood on a hill overlooking Biden’s speech holding signs like “Biden said ‘no more coal in America’” and “Stop the war on coal, fire Obama.”

Mitchell Metzler a miner and Iraq war veteran, said he came to the protest after finishing his midnight shift at the mine.

“I spent a year in Iraq serving my country, and now they want to take away my job,” he said.

Kevin Hughes, the superintendent at the American Energy Corporation Century Mine in Beallsville, Ohio, which organized the rally of its workers, said the reason they were protesting is simple: President Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda is killing jobs.

“We want to save our jobs. We want to save this valley,” he said.

Ed Good, an electrician at a local coal-fired power plant and a member of the Obama campaign’s “Truth Team” dismissed the notion that there is a “war on coal,” noting that coal mining jobs reached a 14-year high last year, but acknowledging that there are still problems with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Good mentioned that when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts he too took a hard line on coal.

“Back then the governor was saying I’m going to shut down any plant that kills people — he was referring to a coal plant, a utility plant,” he said.

Read more: http://buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/coal-miners-protest-biden-in-ohio

The history you learned was probably too boring to properly shape your paradigm. These are 25 mind boggling facts that will change your perspective on history.

25. The pyramids are so old, that even King Tut would most likely have referred to them as “ancient”

24. Some Giant Redwoods are older than the pyramids

23. After ruling Egypt for hundreds of years, Cleopatra was the first in her family to learn Egyptian

22. Alaska was the only part of America to be occupied by Axis troops in WWII

21. It has been calculated that in the last 3,000 years there have only been 240 years of peace throughout the civilized world

20. Julius Caeser’s army once split apart to perform a flanking manuever and spent hours in a standoff against itself

19. At its height, the Roman Empire was 2.5 million square miles. It was only the 19th largest empire in history

18. Speaking of empires, Warners Bros. was founded only a few months before the fall of the Ottoman Empire

17. In one afternoon during the Battle of Stalingrad a railway station switched between German and Soviet control fourteen times.

16. The Soviets used dogs strapped with explosives as anti tank weapons. Sometimes, however, the dogs would run back and explode among the Soviets.

15. It is said that for every American killed during World War II about 21 Soviet soldiers were killed.

14. Of the 11 deadliest wars in history, 9 were in China.

13. Sunglasses were actually invented by the Chinese but not to block the sun. They were used by judges in courtrooms to hide their emotions

12. At the time of the Roman Empire babies were nearly 20 times more likely to be born with a tail than they are today

11. John Tyler, who became the 10th president of the United States in 1841 has two living grandchildren

10. The last widow of a Civil War soldier died in 2003. Gertrude Janeway was 18 when she married 81 year old John Janeway in 1927

9. When she died she was still receiving a monthly check for $70 from the Veterans Administration for a military pension earned by her late husband on the Union side of the American Civil War. The amount spanned three centuries

8. On the night of his assassination Martin Luther King had a pillow fight in his motel room

7. On the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, he signed the Secret Service into existence

6. Napoleon was actually taller than the average Frenchman

5. The current U.S. flag was designed by 17 year old Robert Heft for a school project. He received a B minus. When the president selected his design the teacher changed his grade to an A

4. Baseball was actually invented in Britain in 1755, three decades before the commonly accepted date

3. The pyramids were originally completely coated in white marble with 24k gold caps on top

2. In 1927 a Nazi physician named Julius won the Nobel Prize for curing syphilis by giving people malaria

1. All British tanks since 1945 have been equipped with the ability to make tea

Read more: http://list25.com/25-mind-boggling-facts-change-perspective-history/

When Owen Reese Peterson went to the Department of Veterans Affairs in Talihina, Oklahoma, to get treatment for an infected wound, he never left.

The 73-year-old veteran was there for at least three weeks, but he eventually died from sepsis, a life-threatening complication of an infection that can lead to tissue damage and organ failure. What’s disturbing about his stay at the VA hospital is that before he died on October 3, maggots were found crawling all over his wound.

Executive director Myles Deering said that Peterson did not die because of the maggots, but a physician’s assistant and three nurses have resigned as a result.

Read More: Woman Goes Into Labor And Quickly Realizes Her Doctor Is Totally Drunk

Peterson’s son, Raymie Parker, says that his father wasn’t getting the proper care he needed during his time at the facility. While he said that the nurses were great, he was far from impressed with the senior staff.

Read more: http://www.viralnova.com/maggots-in-wound/