Virginians have depended upon our profession to provide well controlled diagnosis and care with a high level of supervision from licensed dentists.  Permitting DA II licensees to scale will likely not impact the standard of care in most private practices.  It will however create an increased disparity with respect to quality of care provided between practices which do not employ DA II assistant as dental hygienists, and those that do.  Those dentists who do not supervise DA II assistants closely and permit them to treat patients with subgingival plaque or calculus will be rewarded monitarily for exploiting a trust that the public perceives as dependable from practice to practice.  This will also create a difficult enforcement issue for the Board of Dentistry.  Dentists who do not schedule DA II assistants with hygiene patients will be penalized with the accrossed the board reduced insurance reimbursements which insurance companies will lilkely cash in on.  Finally, this will not improve the oral health of those patients who have economic limitations.  The value of a supragingival procedure as a preventive measure is inarguably better than none at all, but how much better?  Will those patients truly be treated properly.  Will it be in their best interest to be rescheduled with a Dental Hygienist who will be qualified if they have subgingival calculus?  What then have they gained economically?  I support training and the use of expanded function auxillaries, however subgingival scaling by DA II assistants will be a hardship to our profession, and a disservice to the public..