America's Great Dental Divide

There's seemingly no end to the economic, political, and cultural divides that separate Americans: Republican vs. Democrat, religious vs. secular, beer vs. wine drinkers, Starbucks vs. Dunkin’ Donuts, NPR vs. the NRA, NASCAR vs. World Cup Soccer. But data released this month by the Gallup Organization shows a stark new axis of socioeconomic cleavage: those who regularly go to the dentist, and those who do not.

Derived from a large-scale database of some 177,000 interviews, conducted as part of the ongoing Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the map below shows how the 50 U.S. states stack up in terms of the frequency of visits to the dentist. The variation across states is considerable. People in Massachusetts and Connecticut were much more likely to have visited the dentist over the course of the last 12 months than those in the South. Gallup notes that dentist office visits tend to track income level and health insurance coverage. The states whose residents are most likely to visit the dentist have some of the lowest uninsured rates in the nation.