More Australians are using their superannuation to pay for oral care

ABC NEWS (Australia)

There's been a 12-fold increase in people raiding their retirement nest eggs to fund expensive dental treatments in recent years. Experts are now warning the issue will snowball unless governments invest more in oral healthcare.

Transcript

00:00This is the grim reality John Bedell faces every day.

00:07Not quite an almost liquid diet, but pretty close to it, because I can't chew properly.

00:11It's completely destroyed my social life.

00:13John withdrew almost $40,000 from his super to fix his teeth, but the work was never finished.

00:20The company he paid collapsed.

00:22It's upsetting, annoying, I get angry about it.

00:27In the 2018-19 financial year, the ATO approved the release of about $66 million of super to Australians needing dental treatment.

00:37But that's now grown 12-fold, with about $817 million withdrawn for dental last financial year.

00:45One of the solutions to this problem is to improve public funding for dentistry.

00:49We see the significant increase in demand for this as driven because people are facing a cost of living crisis.

00:56Ann Harris took out $66,000 from her super, but for her, the social returns of new teeth far outweigh the financial loss.

01:06I know how to, you know, save and scrimp and live on a basic wage.

01:12So I just thought, well you know, future Ann can worry about that.

01:17Accessing super for dental treatment was only ever meant to be used in rare cases.

01:23It's increasingly anything but.

01:25The federal government's monitoring the issue.

01:27However, based on the current trend, more Australians will be choosing between their nest eggs or their teeth.

01:33So just waiting for several years to prevent the differences from getting to know if they're from that knife.

01:40This was a otros 2-3-3-4-9-7-6-8-9-8-8-8-8-8-8-9-7-8.

01:43So they were trying to explain the fotos that were like, you know, for all of us, just a few days before they break down.

01:45We were trying to 저는 some people, but we wanted to talk more about the scary issues.

01:47If they don't know a lot about this in theórk, they were trying to go through all of the things that I can say.

01:49I know that's not good.

01:51That's not a good idea.

01:53I know it's true that we've been a lot of a lot of in the world that I think that this does.

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