Does Your Insurance Cover Chiropractic Care?

There are many things about being a chiropractor that I find aggravating at times, but nothing sets my teeth on edge like spending an hour arguing with a patient's health insurance company over whether or not they have the right (or the need) to receive chiropractic care. Sometimes I go home at the end of the day feeling like just because I don't hand out prescriptions for pain killers to every patient that walks through my doors, somehow in the eyes of the insurance industry I'm not a real health care provider.

You know and I know that sometimes chiropractic care is not only necessary, but the best course of treatment for one condition or another. If you could choose between spending the rest of your life as a slave to pain pills or receiving chiropractic care to reduce your pain, which would you choose? That's a choice many patients have to make.

The problem is, these patients aren't the ones making that choice. Their doctors aren't doing it either. Somehow along the way the system has managed to double back on itself, allowing insurance companies to dictate what treatments and procedures patients can and can't receive because many of these patients can't afford chiropractic care out of pocket and their insurance companies won't pay for what they consider to be "radical and unconventional" treatment for many conditions.

Does your insurance cover chiropractic care? If the answer is yes, you're lucky. If the answer is no, and you think you might need or want chiropractic services in the future, it might be a good idea to start hunting for another insurance provider. Otherwise, goodness only knows what treatment they might dream up next.