ASDA Annual Session

First off, ASDA stands for American Student Dental Association. My position within the organization is the Legislative Liaison for LLU School of Dentistry.

As mentioned in my last post, we spent most of last week in a hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. This was the second time I have participated as a delegate from my school. The way the ASDA house is run is really neat because it's a lot like the US Senate. Every dental school in the nation has two voting representatives, we use parliamentary procedure, and we basically debate about and vote on various resolutions.

This year went really smoothly with most of the voting being nearly unanimous. I made a difference by standing up and proposing an amendment to insert the word "only" into a resolution. My proposed amendment passed (wahoo!) and then the resolution barely squeaked by.

That happened to be on a somewhat insignificant resolution. The main issues we tried to address as a governing body were the perennial issues of "access to care" and "licensure reform", as well as the relatively new concern involving "mid-level providers" of dental care.

During one of the "breakout sessions" (such a misleading name) one of the students asked a lobbyist for the ADA, "What do we tell our classmates when they ask us why organized dentistry is important?"
He paused for a moment and then looked at us and said, "It's important so that dentistry doesn't end up like medicine. If they can look at the medical community and they see no problem, tell them it doesn't matter - but tell them to ask a pediatrician how much money they make. And it's not all about money, but you can't expect someone to go to school for 8 years and then make $70,000 per year." He went on to explain that the medical community's big mistake was dividing up their associations among the various specialties, thereby weakening their voice in DC. The dental community, on the other hand, has a pretty strong voice in DC which is definitely going to be needed in the next few years as the "mid-level provider" issue plays out.

Anyway, that sums up the business end of the trip. For the less boring, crazy family stories (or if you happen to just be an anti-dentite) check my wife's blog to see how we spent some of the other break-out sessions.