Dental health is part of being healthy. A lot of dental work is surgery. To me, it should be part of regular medical care.
Dentistry is the earliest specialization of medicine and the first to be studied with modern scientific rigor - dental problems are universal in agricultural societies, and it's much easier to see what's going on without modern tech. So its separation from other branches of medicine is a natural historical accident. (Likewise with early optometrists being "applied opticians" vs early ophthalmologists guessing about the biology of the eye.)
The fact that minor dental treatments are physically invasive compared to other branches of medicine means that dental training will always be different from other physicians, and this naturally extends to professional organizations. But it shouldn't extend to insurance companies.
As I recall, when "modern medicine" was first forming, there was a push to make it part of what we would consider standard medical care, but another, more influential party decided (incorrectly) that teeth weren't living tissue and should be excluded.
The divide took hold and we ended up with the system we have today, where teeth are independent of the rest of the medical field. It's especially noticeable when you have dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons, each separate specialties referring between each other, but only oral surgeons falling under medical insurance.
The reason I remember (I don’t know which of us or both are right) is that modern doctors came out of the “medical”/healing specialty where as dentists came out of the barber/surgeon tradition.
So I believe doctors didn’t want to admit their inferiors (barbers who pull teeth) to the profession and so that’s why dentists were kept out.
Overtime they’ve both grown in parallel since they end up covering a lot of the same things. X-rays, infections, medications + dosages. but dentist still get different training than “real“ doctors.
It does seem like dentistry should probably be a specialty of a normal doctor program at this point, but it’s not for some kind of historical reason as you mentioned.
Most the articles I find talk about the barber vs doctor distinction, but they also all bring up a story about a proposal to add dentistry to the University of Maryland's medical school.
Evidently this proposal was put before the state legislature, was rejected, and thus was born the Baltimore College of Dentistry. From their own website:
> With the founding of the college, dentistry became a profession separate from medicine. Dentistry could have become a medical specialty if the Maryland legislature had approved a request to incorporate it as a department at the University of Maryland’s medical school, but the request was rejected owing to cost. Dentistry then set its own course.
https://www.mchoralhealth.org/milestones/1840.html
From what I can see, people seem to point to this story as a historical waypoint for the division of the two in the US.
Very weird to think it was a decision by a legislature that set that path going forward.
I guess I had just assumed it was some kind of professional medical association that decided it.
Regarding funding, I agree that preventative care should be covered under health insurance like physical exams, because if you go for a cleaning twice a year you probably aren’t going to have many problems and if you don’t go for a cleaning twice a year you probably are going to have a lot of problems. But many dental treatments are cosmetic in nature and not medically necessary and probably would not be covered under the current health insurance regime in the United States, but are covered under the dental insurance regime. It’s important to note that dental coverage in the US is widely available as a separate part of “Obamacare” subsidized by the government and children’s coverage on the marketplace is even stronger without waiting periods and limits on max out of pockets in a way that is generous compared to most private offerings.
But ... the business model and incentives are different. A general practice MD, doesn't get a cut of revenue when they write a prescription. The incentives are closer to a plastic surgeons. And you can see similar lapses of ethics in that field.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_value_unit
If you ever wonder why some doctors order any test they can possibly, even remotely, justify, this is why.