Keeping licensure moving: S4261/A3389 and S1413/A3390 

On Thursday the Assembly passed two bills that will not make headlines but will make a difference for any dentist or hygienist waiting on a license. NJDA supported both and put a statement in every member’s packet before the caucus met. 

A3389 fixes a quiet problem. The State Board of Dentistry, like every licensing board under the Division of Consumer Affairs, needs a quorum to act. When seats sit vacant - and they do - a board can go months unable to process even routine applications. A3389 allows a board that has gone 90 days without a workable quorum to process clean licensure applications with the members it has. It is narrow by design: only applicants with no adverse background-check finding, and only application processing, not discipline or rulemaking. A dentist who has met every requirement should not wait on an appointment calendar. 

A3390 gives us something New Jersey has never had: public data on how licensing actually works. The Division of Consumer Affairs would publish annual figures for every board - application volumes, average processing times, active licensees by county, exam pass rates. Today there is no public dataset on how long dental licensure takes or where licensed providers are concentrated. That gap makes it harder to tell the Legislature where access problems are real and what would fix them. It also has a practical use for members. A dentist deciding where to open a practice could see, county by county, where providers are thin and where they are crowded, without paying a consultant to piece together the same picture. That helps an early-career dentist choose a location, and it helps a dentist planning to sell show a buyer what the local market looks like. The State already collects this data. This bill puts it where dentists can use it. 

A3390 passed 77-0. A3389 passed 71-5, with Assembly members Bergen, Dunn, Peterson, Rumpf and Webber voting no. Both bills were sponsored by Assemblyman Sterley Stanley (D-18), who chairs the Health Care Infrastructure Committee, with Assemblywoman Shanique Speight (D-29), Assemblywoman Alixon Collazos-Gill (D-27) and Assemblyman Clinton Calabrese (D-36). Stanley, Speight and Calabrese are also co-sponsors of A1702, the Dentist and Dental Hygienist Compact. 

Why it matters beyond the paperwork: every month a qualified provider sits unlicensed is lost patient capacity, lost revenue for the practices that need them, and lost income for the State. New Jersey dental offices support more than 75,000 jobs and nearly $15 billion in annual economic activity (ADA Health Policy Institute, 2022). Licensure delay compounds a workforce shortage we are otherwise working to fix. 

The Senate is already most of the way there. S4261, the Senate version of A3389, was reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee 4-0 on October 5 and is ready for a floor vote. S1413, the Senate version of A3390, cleared Commerce in February and is awaiting action in the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. Both are sponsored by Senator Joseph Lagana (D-38), with Senator Robert Singer (R-30) as a co-sponsor on each. NJDA will be asking Senate leadership to post S4261 for a vote and the Budget Committee to take up S1413 before the end of the year. When a message from a constituent can help, we’ll let you know. 

At the table with Medicaid: what NJDA asked DHS this week 

On Thursday morning NJDA attended the Medical Assistance Advisory Council - MAAC - the body that advises the Department of Human Services on NJ FamilyCare. It meets quarterly, and this week’s agenda was the State’s implementation of the federal budget law, H.R. 1. For the first time this year, the meeting included an open public comment period. We used it. 

The comment card gives you four lines. Ours asked two things: of the roughly 25,000 non-citizen adults who were sent documentation letters before October 1, how many kept coverage and how many lost it; and will the Division publish the dental emergency room data that managed care organizations already report to it every month. We followed up in writing with the full version, which asks for four things, every one of them aimed at keeping dentists in the program: 

• Publish the dental data DHS already has. MCOs report non-traumatic dental ER visits monthly under the managed care contract. We asked that it be released by month and county alongside the H.R. 1 disenrollment numbers, with adult dental utilization, eligibility-related claim denials, and dentists leaving the network added. None of it requires new collection. 

• Report the October 1 outcome. The State said 25,000 were “potentially affected.” We asked for the actual count. 

• Make eligibility workable for a dental office. Starting in January, expansion adults are renewed every six months and retroactive coverage drops to one month. Dentistry is multi-visit work, so practices carry the risk when coverage lapses between the root canal and the crown. We asked for a reliable way to verify coverage dates before treatment, automatic reprocessing of claims when a patient’s eligibility is restored, and a public target for how many renewals the State will complete from its own records without sending a form. 

• Don’t lose dentists to a missed letter. Provider revalidation is coming to dental practices under the State’s two-year strategy. We asked when, how dentists will be notified, and how long they’ll have to respond. 

Two systems, one week 

The licensing bills and the Medicaid comments are the same story told from two sides. Access to dental care in New Jersey fails when the workforce cannot get to the chair and when the payment system cannot keep dentists in the program. This week NJDA worked on both.