Dr. Mouhab Rizkallah

While most orthodontists focus on reshaping their patients’ mouths, Dr. Mouhab Rizkallah has been working to reshape the dental industry itself. His push for a dramatic change in how dental-coverage companies pay out benefits – via his successful 2022 Massachusetts ballot initiative, Question 2 – is just the latest in a string of battles this orthodontist has fought to improve care for patients.

Not only has Dr. Rizkallah initiated Question 2 and filed numerous lawsuits against MassHealth, which oversees the Bay State’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—he also helped pay for these efforts, including the more than $3 million he reports to have spent on the ballot initiative. “I’m heavily invested in real estate and whatnot,” Dr. Rizkallah, 48, says. “This is not financially oriented. I’m life purpose-oriented, and I use money as artillery. That’s really what it is. I’m trying to do things that are meaningful to me.”

Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, just across the river from Boston, Dr. Rizkallah grew up in what he describes as the “hardworking blue-collar town” of Port Jervis, New York. He married his high school sweetheart. “She and I have been together for 33 years,” he says. “She was my pastor’s kid.”

After earning separate undergraduate degrees in biology and business management at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a dental degree at SUNY Stony Brook, on Long Island, Dr. Rizkallah did his resi­dency in the Boston area and never left. He opened his first orthodontic practice in Somerville’s Davis Square, eventually expanding to five additional locations.

“You come out of dental school, you go to an orthodontic program and then you start to see all of these problems in dentistry,” he says. “You’re saying, ‘Well, where is the solution? Who is going to come to fix this?’ We delegate to our organizations, but nothing’s happening. It’s ineffective.”

What he observed was that there was far more talk about a better, more transparent and reliable system for insurance payments than actual advocacy among most dentists. “There came a point where someone’s got to do something, so that’s how it came about for me,” he says.

Dr. Andrew Chase, past president of the Massachusetts Association of Orthodontists and current chair of its Public & Professional Relations Committee, says he often has collaborated with Dr. Rizkallah to ensure that patients, particularly underprivileged ones, could receive high-quality care and decent benefits. “Mo and I have fought side by side against MassHealth for years,” Dr. Chase says, noting that Dr. Rizkallah would often be the “bad cop,” pursuing litigation while Dr. Chase’s good cop was “trying to create levers [to effect meaningful change]” through his organization.

“He is talented in law, he is financially capable and he is dedicated to his patients in a way that I don’t know any provider is,” Dr. Chase says of his compatriot. “Nobody can accuse him of trying to get rich in orthodontics when such a significant percentage of his practice is underprivileged. The changes he’s forced have allowed several thousand kids to get care.”

The American Dental Association gave Dr. Rizkallah and members of his Question 2 campaign committee a presidential citation for their work on the referendum. “He’s courageous and willing to take risks and push forward,” says Chad Olson, the American Dental Association’s director of state government affairs. “I think dentists are very aware of what he did.”

Dr. Mark Vitale, an Edison, New Jersey-based dentist who chairs the Garden State’s Dental Political Action Committee, credits Dr. Rizkallah with making the public aware of the dental benefits system’s manifold problems. “He’s someone who saw an issue, was fed up with dealing with it, he was fortunate to have enough financial backing and he was able to make a public issue that we were all able to jump onto and help out with,” Dr. Vitale says. “It created a great conversation nationally for dentists to have with their patients.”

— Dr. Abe Abdul, the Cambridge-based president-elect of the Massachusetts

Reprinted with permission from Incisal Edge magazine, The 32 Most Influential People in Dentistry, Summer 2023. ©2023 Benco Dental. To read more, visit https://www.incisaledgemagazine.com/mag/article/7th-annual-32-most-influential-people-in-dentistry/