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What the State's own reports show
The statute requires DHCS to publish, every month, the number of people requesting a BDE and the specific outcome of each request. It does. We read all twelve reports published since the current plan contracts began on 1 July 2025, and counted the outcome column.
107
BDE requests received, July 2025 through June 2026
130
Cases closed in the same twelve months
80
Closed with the member recorded as non-responsive
0
Exceptions granted, in any month, to anyone
More cases closed than arrived because a case can close in a later month than the one it came in. The reports say 31 of these closures came from requests filed in June 2025, which is a month the same reports elsewhere say had no requests at all. That one we cannot resolve. On the last figure: DHCS does not record a granted exception under that name. Its label for the exception actually being granted is the word “Unsuccessful”, and the table below is where that gets explained.
What those words mean, in DHCS's own definitions
Every report carries the same three definitions. They are worth reading slowly, because only one of them is a BDE being granted.
The three outcomes DHCS records, quoted from its monthly reports
| Outcome |
DHCS definition |
What it means for you |
| Successful |
“member was able to get an appointment and seen by a DMC provider” |
You stay in the plan. You got seen, which is what you wanted. |
| Unsuccessful |
“member was not able to get an appointment and was granted exception to FFS” |
You leave the plan. This is the only outcome that is a BDE being granted. |
| Member Non-Responsive |
“member was contacted and did not respond or offered an appointment with a DMC provider but did not accept the offer or attend the appointment” |
Nothing happens. The case closes and you are where you started. |
The count
Across all twelve monthly reports from July 2025 to June 2026, we counted 130 closed cases. Fifty are recorded as Successful. Eighty are recorded as Member Non-Responsive. None is recorded as Unsuccessful.
Method: we took every row of the closed cases table in each monthly report, which DHCS publishes as Figure 3, and tallied the outcome column. Our per month totals match the sentence each report prints above its own table, so the arithmetic is DHCS's as well as ours.
BDE requests and closed case outcomes by month, from the reports DHCS published. The last column is the outcome DHCS labels “Unsuccessful”
| Month |
Requests received |
Cases closed |
Successful |
Member non-responsive |
Exception granted |
| July 2025 | 28 | 31 | 5 | 26 | 0 |
| August 2025 | 5 | 32 | 23 | 9 | 0 |
| September 2025 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| October 2025 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| November 2025 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| December 2025 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| January 2026 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| February 2026 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| March 2026 | 8 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| April 2026 | 20 | 17 | 1 | 16 | 0 |
| May 2026 | 16 | 18 | 6 | 12 | 0 |
| June 2026 | 9 | 9 | 3 | 6 | 0 |
| Total | 107 | 130 | 50 | 80 | 0 |
Compiled from the twelve monthly Beneficiary Dental Exception reports published by DHCS on its BDE reports page. Requests received is the figure each report gives in its opening sentence. The other three columns are our tally of the outcome column in each report's closed cases table.
Zero was also the answer ten years ago
A December 2015 study of Sacramento's dental managed care program for children, prepared by Barbara Aved Associates at the suggestion of the county's Medi-Cal Dental Advisory Committee, counted the requests DHCS had received since the process began in September 2012. “As of the end of July 2015, there have been 573 BDE-related requests for children. None of them has resulted in a transfer over to FFS”, it says, and its Table 17, transfers to fee-for-service by plan, reads 0, 0 and 0, on DHCS's own data.
The study's summary put it plainly: “The process is not working as originally intended by the legislation”. It reported that advocates believed DHCS “has interpreted the law as providing a means for making managed care work better,” and its second recommendation was to “make the BDE process the genuine opt-out it was intended to be”. So the pattern in the twelve reports above is not new. It is what the process has done in both periods anyone has counted. We have not yet tallied the reports DHCS posted for 2017 through 2023, and until we do, those years are a gap rather than a claim.
What we are and are not saying. We are not saying anyone was refused. There is no record of a refusal in these documents, because the reports do not have a category for one. What the documents show is that in twelve months of published reporting, the route out of a plan was never the way a case ended. Cases ended because somebody got an appointment, or because the member stopped answering. Whether that reflects plans fixing access, members giving up, or a process that quietly resolves itself before the exception is reached, the reports do not say, and we are not going to guess.
One number worth sitting with
Sixty-two percent of closed cases, 80 out of 130, ended with the member classed as non-responsive. DHCS's definition of that phrase is broad. It covers someone who never picked up, and equally someone who was offered an appointment and did not accept it. Those are very different situations filed under one heading, and the reports do not separate them.