The Insurance Climate

When we place a lot of resources upfront, such as employing physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, physical therapists, yoga instructors, it does have a lot of start-up costs. But what we’re finding is we don’t know the status of our healthcare monetary appropriation. Right now it seems like from the previous administration, we have enough resources to continue our program for at least the next 10 to 15 years, but it’s hard to know what that means with potential changes in access to Medicare and Medicaid insurances, but at this point we’re well supported. We have a certain endowment and we’re working actively with obtaining grants to continue to fund our program. I think in some ways even though our program feels like a de facto program, when patients have already had their interventions, injections, operations, they come to us, and we’re trying to change that way of thinking. Our goal is almost preventative. So when we do incorporate patients into our pain clinic, we want to take not only patients who are past those procedural techniques, but also may be considering alternatives in opioid managements before they even get on an opioid. I think once they approach our program with the modalities of treatment that we have, the outcomes are going to be better and the healthcare cost on the backend is going to diminish significantly. Because right now we’re just treating symptoms. We’re not really treating the whole person. Our goal is to really treat the whole person in an integrated approach.