I concur entirely with the comments posted by former employee and friend, Patricia Damon-Johnson, RDH, MS.  (See above.)

I was quite surprised to read that a number of my Virginia colleagues feel a dental assistant should be permitted to provide any type of subgingival treatment, much less scaling with curettage instruments, irrespective of their levels of dental assistant training.  Has no one considered the risks and subsequent rises in costs of malpractice insurance?  Would assistants, then, be required to be licensed and insured? 

Further, I am trying to figure out how such allowances could possibly benefit the patient, when there are perfectly capable, licensed individuals out there; namely dental hygienists, who can perform these procedures without anyone else's help (lest we not forget that dentists can, too!).

I see this only as an attempt to increase practice profits by paying less for DAIIs than RDHs. 

How much more transparent could this effort be?