DENTISTS in Lancashire are ditching NHS patients at the rate of more than 300 a month.

A staggering total of almost 42,000 have been "de-registered" in the past two and a half years.

Just imagine what an outcry there would be if, instead of dentists, it was family doctors who were barring the surgery door.

Yet here we have, as this newspaper has warned before, an arm of the hallowed National Health Service, with its pledge of care for all, being allowed to wither as standards of dental health revert back to those of the pre-NHS era.

The situation is now so bad here in East Lancashire - already a region with a rotten record for bad teeth - that health bosses are struggling to prevent a total breakdown in NHS dentistry.

For tens of thousands of people the choice is go private or go without.

And for many of those, this is no choice at all - they just cannot afford the fees.

It was bad enough before when NHS charges of as much as 80 per cent of the cost of treatment caused too many on low incomes to neglect their teeth.

Now, they are being excluded - at the rate of two a minute across the country, according to statistics released by the Liberal Democrats.

But why does this serious and massive neglect go on?

It was, we believe, deliberately started by the government.

Shamefully, it is content for it to continue.

For it is now four years since, in another tightening of the screw on health expenditure, it cut dentists' fees for NHS treatment by seven per cent.

The upshot has been mass withdrawal from NHS work - simply because so many dentists cannot afford to do it.

Yet, rather than reacting with concern to the disastrous consequences for public health, the government is happy for the rot to spread.

That is because a whole sector of the NHS is incidentally privatised while the government seeks to blame the "greedy" dentists for that effect.

And, one suspects, this is what they hoped for at the outset.

But is no-one other than the Liberal Democrats going to damn them for this scandal and force them to properly fund NHS dentistry?

The time is long overdue.

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