More and more people are turning to acupuncture for the many health benefits that this form of treatment can provide. At the same time, health insurance companies are unwilling to cover the cost of the acupuncture treatments, or are placing limits on what they will cover. This is one example where insurers are not in touch with what their customers want in a health insurance policy.
A report done by Deloitte and Oxford Economics find that in 2009, people spent $363 billion dollars more on health care than the official government reports acknowledged. This is a 15% discrepancy. For many people, those out of pocket health care costs are coming from alternatives to traditional Western medicine.
The National Health Interview Survey was conducted in 2007. It asked people about what sorts of alternative medicine they were using. In that year, around 3.1 million adults, and 150,000 children had used acupuncture as a form of treatment. When asked about the five years that lead up to the survey, it was revealed that the use of acupuncture had increased by about 1 million people.
Unfortunately, most health insurance companies are not covering the cost, (or the entire cost), of acupuncture treatments. According to a 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, only about half of employer sponsored health plans will cover acupuncture. Other health plans limit the coverage to 20 acupuncture sessions for an entire year. This arbitrary number does not in any way reflect the amount of acupuncture treatments that a person truly needs to have, in order to ease their pain, or improve their health.
Since most of the Americans who currently have health insurance are able to afford it because it was a benefit of their job, this means that there are a lot of people who are paying for health insurance that won’t actually cover what they need.
There are some things that you can do in order to make the insurance aspects of your acupuncture treatments much less of a pain to deal with. Many insurance companies will only cover the cost of acupuncture treatments that come from a licensed therapist. You might need to specifically ask your insurance agent for an exact definition of what that means, so you can determine if the acupuncturist you want to see fits that description.
If your health insurance doesn’t cover acupuncture at all, see if your insurer has an “affinity program”. If they have one, it means that the insurance company has partnered with certain acupuncturists in a “special deal”. This could mean that you will get a discounted price (of 20% to 40% ) if you go with one of the acupuncturists on the list.
Another option is to choose not to work through your insurance company at all. Talk over payment options with your acupuncturist. Perhaps he or she will give you a little bit of a discount if you don’t make him or her have to deal with sending claims to an insurance company. It is worth asking about.
Image by Marnie Joyce on Flickr