When Health Insurance May Not Be on Our Side

The cost of healthcare of course is a concern. The insurance companies are in the business of providing insurance and healthcare professionals and patients are seeking out quality care. There’s an inherent conflict there because unfortunately pain is a complex biopsychosocial problem. It really does require a comprehensive team and there is a cost involved in the treatment. The approach of using things that are inexpensive may often not be the best interest and there are ramifications down the line. The people are suffering harms because of addiction and abuse; there’re harms that people are missing work and not able to pay insurance premiums. The insurance companies have to look at this in a multidimensional way. It’s very challenging though to have them sit down and look at a singular price of a single treatment and make a determination on it and get them to be supportive. I think there’s efforts certainly to try to leverage law and use state legislatures to pass bills that will basically demand certain access, but I haven’t really seen a whole lot of enforcement. I think there’s still a large disconnect between the payers and the providers right now.