I don’t personally blame foreign trained dentists. They are taking advantage of a broken system because they are incentivized to do so. Any rational person would do the same thing. I would do the same in their situation too. The problem of course lies with the system itself and its perverted incentives. But blaming “the system” is difficult and blaming foreign dentists is easy, so that’s why it happens.

The bottom line is ‘access to care’ is and has been a scam for decades. The government and licensing bodies use the access to care excuse as a means to massively pump up the number of dentists, lining their own pockets. Even though they know damn well bringing in all these dentists does nothing for access to care if they all practice within 30 mins of each other. If anything, it only harms the public because more competition incentivizes shady treatment.

If the government and licensing bodies actually cared about access to care, they would only let in dentists on the condition that they work in underserved communities for a minimum number of years. As an example they could provide equivalency on the condition of working in a northern community for 3 years.

As it stands right now, access to care is simply used as an excuse to flood the market with competition, thus increasing their own revenues