Many children in Arkansas lack the medical insurance required for the care they need, according to a new report from Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families. The portion of young children in the U.S. who were uninsured increased 23% between 2022 and 2024, and Arkansas' rate is one of the worst in the country. The discrepancy is even worse for dental insurance. He runs the Smile Shoppe, a private dental practice in Rogers. They’ve started a new in-house membership program designed to provide an alternative to insurance. Earlier this week, Dr. Rhodes spoke with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis about the new Little Heroes Loyalty Program and how small clinics can think differently about how patients compensate for treatment.
The dentist can be a scary place, especially for young children. Rogers dentist Dr. Jeff Rhodes is very aware of this and has designed his practice to combat those nerves, from bright colors to having everyone in one room together.
"We're in an open bay. And so you kind of observe it and it typically works really well to be in the open bay because other kids can say, well, that little gal over there is doing great. I don't have to be afraid. Nothing's happening. And so there's a lot of, I think maybe I don't know what the right word is trying to use the word community, but that's not the right word. I think there's a lot of, you know, that's the culture of what's going on in the space. And so you kind of join into what you what you feel and sense every day."
Every day, he witnesses the full spectrum of emotion.
"You see fearful kids, you see happy kids, you see fearful parents. There's all this emotion surrounding healthcare."
Dr. Rhodes says that an element contributing to parents' fears is how they'll pay for their kid's treatment. Dental insurance has some problems that have gotten worse over the past few years. The core issue is that insurance payments have barely budged, while costs have increased for both dentists and patients. Buying coverage for your family and running a dental practice have both gotten more expensive, creating a squeeze on both ends.
"We're not part of a large hospital group that does fundraisers. We're all mom and pop individual businesses for the most part. There are large dental organizations called DSOs, and there are some in Arkansas. But for the most part, you know, we've got four locations, but I'm literally the top of the mom and pop."
Medicaid has also proved to be troublesome from Dr. Rhodes' perspective. For one, it's complicated to work with, even if you qualify for the program. But an issue he often sees is that families make too much money for Medicaid benefits, but not enough to afford employer plans or out-of-pocket prevention that insurers won't cover.
Smile Shoppe's Little Heroes loyalty plan is his way of bypassing that system.
"There's an initiation fee and then a monthly fee, and for that you get two cleanings, two exams, all the X-rays you need and an emergency visit. If you choose to use fluoride, we'd apply that. Just basic preventive things to help somebody stay healthy. And with the preventive visits — we don't call them maintenance visits, we call them preventive visits because we're working with the kids to make sure they're brushing well, helping them learn to eat properly, you know, things that are less cavity-causing diet. And so it's just a relationship-building thing that we're doing every six months. That is what is included with just the membership initiation and monthly fee. And if there are multiple kids, we reduce the rate. And then if there's work that's needed to be done, we're giving a percent off of our fees. And so we want to help families that are doing it on their own nickel be able to afford dental care."
This works out financially for them, too. Plus, folks without insurance will get the chance to build a relationship with their provider.
"We feel that it's going to be a win for both of us. It's going to provide us a fair reimbursement for what we're doing. It's going to be a less expensive price for the families. They have some coverage. They have some knowledge that there's somebody there. We talk a lot in pediatric dentistry about a dental home. And a dental home is a relationship. It's not necessarily a building you go to. It's the relationship you have."
This type of loyalty program may become more commonplace as the trend of declining insured populations is nationwide. However, Arkansas is an area of increasing need.
"We are slightly above average in the rate of uninsured kids. The statistics for dental insurance are harder to get — they study medical insurance more frequently — but we know that there is a large percentage of kids that are not covered by dental insurance. We know that in most of the counties that would be considered Northwest Arkansas, there's 7-8% of kids that are not covered. Part of why that has gone up is during COVID."
During the pandemic, Medicaid offered continuous enrollment. That ended in March 2023, requiring all enrollees to actively reverify their eligibility.
“They didn't go and do that — reproving that you required social assistance. So after those COVID increases occurred and they started going back, some people had gotten better jobs and so they no longer qualified for our kids, but maybe they got just a little bit better job. And it wasn't enough that they could take private insurance out of their income and still make the family work. So there are a lot of kids that got trapped between that. I make too much for our kids, but not enough to pay for medical insurance and dental insurance."
Relief is on the way, supposedly. Dr. Rhodes also works as a public policy advocate for the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. He's spoken to lawmakers in Arkansas about the gap between coverage and expenses. He says help should be on the way.
"The reaction from lawmakers is sometimes they feel a pinch. With budgets, they're trying very hard to not spend more money than they have, but they have to provide a level of care. And so the balance between what we can do and what we want to do doesn't always match. Interestingly, in Arkansas, when the dentists started asking the lawmakers to help them get a fee increase because DHS was not going to do that — they were very clear they were not going to do that — all the lawmakers across both political parties said, yeah, we're in."
Lawmakers approved a fee increase, though Dr. Rhodes says he's seen no change. The legislature voted it in last year, effective September 2025, but it still hasn't happened.
However, for Dr. Rhodes, the insurance debate is secondary to a bigger mission. Through the Little Heroes loyalty program, his patients now have an alternative coverage option, allowing him to keep doing what he loves for even more people.
"I come from a place of — I just think that I'm supposed to help kids thrive in every possible way. A good-looking smile opens doors of opportunity. It creates confidence. We know kids that have cavities don't do as well in school. They struggle with pain or insecurity. Sometimes a kid won't smile because they've got cavities and they're embarrassed. And so they don't engage people and they get isolated. There's just all this psychosocial stuff that goes on around having a pretty smile. And so we take it upon ourselves to be the advocate for every application a smile can provide for a child. We want to encourage their physical well-being, their spiritual well-being, their social well-being, their educational well-being — all those things come from a beautiful, happy smile. And that's why we call it the Smile Shoppe. We want to be the place where not only do you have a pretty smile, but you want to use it. And that's really important to me."
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
