I am a former dental hygiene educator and dental hygienist of 22 years. I would like to know who will have the time to train these Assitants on the job? Surely you don’t think the hygienist will have time.  They will be seeing their patients and also treating all the periodontal disease that will happen. Dentists don’t want to take the time and they are not qualified. They think they are, but sadly they are not. When I was teaching we would get patients after they had seen a dental student for a cleaning and they would be a class 3 ( hard patient, lots of calculus) for our students, which meant that they were not being thoroughly graded by the dental faculty and the dental students were doing a poor job. They didn’t even know what the instruments were half the time that we used. I can look at any instrument and tell where it can be used in the mouth. Not everyone makes a good teacher. This is a public safety threat and substandard care.i don’t know anyone that would allow themselves to willingly be worked on by a student in private practice. Dental Assitants do not have the educational background to be doing hygiene. We do more than scale teeth, but we never just do it above the gumline. We go sub on every patient and we are also looking for disease within the mouth, abnormal pathology complications from medications, signs of other diseases or mineral and vitamin deficiencies. Oral cancer screenings, signs of tobacco usage. We can tell how people floss and what type of floss they use just by looking in the mouth. Why? Because we are educated and trained. Proving substandard care is not the answer. Please reconsider your stance as a state. This will not fix the problems you are seeking and will create more problems.