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00:37But that's now grown 12-fold, with about $817 million withdrawn for dental last financial year.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