> Some people lack the self control to use toothpaste regularly. For those people it's beneficial adding flouride to water.
At some point, we can't just replace individual personal responsibility with the State as a solution. This attitude just reeks of infantilization of the total populace just because a certain percentage of them lack such self control.
If you still want to provide support to them, make it targeted towards those individuals in need of such help. Do not drag down the rest of the populace in order to make the lives of a few easier.
I don't think I was expressing much of an attitude in my comment. Just a factual statement that seeks to explain why the intervention is successful even though better alternatives clearly exist.
I don't think water should be flouridated and I don't think we should provide support for people lacking self control.
It's not satire. It takes enough self-control/willpower that, for example, a lot of people suffering from ADHD have problems with it. There are a lot of people out there who just aren't capable of habituating the tasks of brushing their teeth to the point of being done on autopilot - they have to consciously make themselves do it every time.
And that's after more than half a century of brushing teeth being a cultural expectation and something kids are taught in schools.
And that's not counting people in dire economic conditions, where frequency of brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste is something to trade off against e.g. eating.
It's the 21st century. If we know anything about people, we know that self control and "free will" are overrated, and you can't rely on them at scale. On the contrary, you can rely on people having very predictable reactions to right nudges and incentives. It's the basis of modern economy and policymaking. It's the entire reason marketing and advertising are as big and well-paying jobs as they are. Etc.
I can imagine that there might exist people who cannot brush their teeth.
However, for such people the solution is not to drink fluoridated water, but to use fluoridated water to wash their mouth and then spit it.
If they cannot take water in mouth and spit it, then they certainly cannot feed themselves and they need permanent care. Whoever does that should also take care of their teeth.
Regarding money, I cannot believe that to be an obstacle. I eat relatively cheap food, because I buy only raw ingredients that I cook myself. Therefore in most days food costs me at most $5. I doubt that anyone who is really poor succeeds to spend much less for food. I wash my teeth after each meal with rather expensive tooth pastes from Colgate or Sensodyne. Even so, the daily cost for the tooth paste is at least 30 or 50 times less than the cost of food, so unless there is some remote place where the price of tooth paste is much more than 10 times more expensive than in Europe or North America, I cannot believe that being poor would prevent someone to brush their teeth. They would die of hunger much sooner than that.
You could give targeted help to the ones that needs it, it would be more efficient to help them brush their teeth than just adding fluoride to the water that everyone drinks.
We do it by noticing who needs help on the free dental checkups during the first years of life usually. If they have some sort of handicap, they can get help physically brushing or support to do it themselves every day. Helps a lot more than adding something that might work a little in everyones water.
On what basis have you evaluated that it "helps a lot more"? What if your method doesn't lead to more people actively brushing their teeth, thus reducing the amount of people with properly protected teeth (since they are also missing fluoride now), increasing amount of dental healthcare required?
You have to consider that these people have lost some cognitive faculty by ingested fluoride so they may not be capable of rational self interested decision-making.
