What can a case about ensuring healthy teeth for school kids tell us about the kind of president Ted Cruz might be? Quite a bit, as it turns out.
Long before he was a U.S. senator or a presidential candidate, Cruz was a senior official at the Federal Trade Commission. His brief but eventful tenure provides interesting insights into how he might govern. One particular episode — which, as fate would have it, took place in South Carolina — is especially revealing.
In 2003, as part of an initiative launched by a Cruz-led Task Force, the FTC filed suit against the South Carolina State Board of Dentistry. At issue was an “emergency regulation” restricting the ability of non-dentists to provide teeth cleanings, sealants, and fluoride treatments in school settings. The Board — whose 9 members included 7 practicing dentists — argued that the regulation was necessary to protect public health. The FTC countered that its true intent was to block competition from dental hygienists.
The Board insisted that, without the supervision of a dentist, a hygienist might seal in tooth decay, resulting in a dangerous abscess. When pressed on the issue, however, it could not provide a single example of this ever actually happening.
The FTC has always focused on anticompetitive restraints of trade. What Cruz brought to the table that was new, and what the Dental Board case illustrates, is a focus on government as the source of the restraint. Overreaching with respect to professional licensing is a classic example.
Such licensing can be a good thing. When you need open heart surgery, you want a licensed physician. But other examples — such as weeks of classroom instruction and years of apprenticeship to obtain a license to cut hair or arrange flowers — strongly suggest that it is the professionals themselves, rather than consumers, who are being protected.
The Dental Board case was ultimately resolved by settlement, with the Board agreeing to withdraw its emergency regulation — a great result that expanded access to teeth cleanings in South Carolina schools. But today the case is more important for what it tells voters about Senator Cruz:
Cruz fights for free markets and level playing fields — critics have asserted that Big Oil was behind Cruz’s opposition to ethanol subsidies. Presumably this means that Big Sugar was behind his opposition to the Dental Board. In fact, both actions were driven by a consistent commitment to free markets. While at the FTC, Cruz opposed competition-distorting governmental preferences in a host of other professions, ranging from attorneys and funeral directors to opticians and mortgage brokers — experience that could come in handy with the U.S. falling from 6th to 11th in a recent ranking of the world’s freest economies.
Cruz’s approach yields benefits up and down the economic ladder — the Dental Board case primarily benefitted two groups, neither of which were Wall Street bankers or corporate CEOs. The first was dental hygienists — a profession consisting of 98 percent women, more than half of whom work part time. The second was South Carolina children from low income families. Unsurprisingly, these children are more likely to receive oral health care services in a school setting than in a traditional dentist’s office. The FTC found that, in a sample of 4,000 children receiving hygienist-administered services, 3,000 were Medicaid-eligible.
Cruz gets results in spite of institutional constraints — Perhaps the most striking thing about the entire episode was the dramatic results Cruz was able to achieve with the relatively modest tools available to him at the FTC. In addition to the settlement with the Dental Board and repeal of the emergency regulation, the Cruz-led Task Force laid the foundation for two subsequent FTC cases that proceeded all the way to the Supreme Court. Both cases resulted in favorable clarifications of the law that have, in turn, spurred more than a dozen legal challenges to anticompetitive actions by industry-dominated boards and commissions across the country.
As the Dental Board case demonstrates, Cruz has proven adept at solving problems with the tools at his disposal. Indeed, in an era of gridlock, the South Carolina episode provides a compelling glimpse into what might be achieved by an outsider candidate with insider know-how.
John Delacourt and Asheesh Agarwal were advisors to Cruz at the FTC. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
