On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (11–393). One aspect of the law may produce a fundamental shift in health care: we may see more spending on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) while costs decrease.
On page 436, section 3502, 6.F., it discusses requirements for health teams. One requirement is that the health team needs to provide support for local primary care providers, including coordination of CAM services for those who request such services. When I saw this, I thought, “Big health care savings!” I’ll write a second post discussing the definition of a “health team.”
In our current system, if a patient wants to see a CAM practitioner, many doctors will tell the patient to find their own CAM practitioner. So many patients won’t get a referral.
But with healthcare reform, as patients request CAM services, there’s now a legal obligation to help such patients find CAM services. Let me repeat that: there’s now a legal obligation for health teams to help such patients find CAM services.
And since CAM services are often less expensive, there’s the potential for big health care savings. For example, a study was done on the state of Washington, which mandates insurance coverage for CAM practitioners. The study concluded that for back pain, fibromyalgia and menopause symptoms, those who used CAM had lower insurance costs.
The study was published in the April 2010 edition of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine under the exciting title, “Comparison of Health Care Expenditures Among Insured Users and Nonusers of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Washington State: A Cost Minimization Analysis.”
You can read more on the National Institutes of Health’s website by clicking below.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110809