Last month, Tashenia Torres went to the dentist after experiencing sharp, excruciating pain in her jaw — a result of the growth of her wisdom teeth. Still, without insurance to afford dental care, she said the clinic wasn’t much help in scheduling an extraction.
“I told them, ‘I don’t have the money, I don’t even have health insurance, so how can I take it out?’” Torres said. “They said, ‘You need to get the money in order to get it taken out,’ and I thought that was just unfair.”
Torres, a 31-year-old Gainesville resident, isn’t the only local who finds dental care inaccessible. An estimated 6 million Floridians struggle or face barriers accessing dental care, according to the Floridians for Dental Access…