May 2009

Delisting should be our wake-up call

by Dr. Terry A. Rondberg

The delisting of chiropractic by the Alberta Health Services has once more emphasized the precarious nature of the third-party payer system. Whether it's medical insurance companies or government agencies, we're still putting our financial health in the hands of outsiders who have no interest in our well-being.

In the case of Alberta, the reason given for dropping chiropractic from the health plan was economic. Doctors of chiropractic accounted for $53 million of the province's health care insurance budget and they decided we simply weren't worth that much.

Although they kept hauling out statistics and financial figures, few people were fooled. The Edmonton Journal website posted comments from readers about the delisting news and it was amazing to see how clearly these people saw through the excuses.

One reader posted this comment: "'Budgetary' was the reason given. Hmmm, MDs given a huge 13.8% INCREASE while Chiros get axed?? It clearly wasn't financial. Chiros save them more than they ever cost them."

But if budget wasn't the reason, what was?

Another online commenter had a good answer to that. "Someone who sits in a position to make the decision has a terrible dislike for Chiropractic Care. They obviously are pro-medicine as they have been 'allowed' to influence this Province's Health Minister to take away the people's choice in their health care by cutting chiropractic care and then giving the medical profession a raise in salary."

A quick look at political donations shows why government officials are pro-medicine.

I don't know the figures for Canada, but in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry gave a whopping $28,801,866 to candidates during the 2008 campaign cycle. Special interest groups representing medical doctors gave the vast majority of the $94,992,089 donated by health care professionals. Nearly $124 million buys a lot of loyalty in any nation's government.

As one online poster explained: "Delisting chiropractic care was inevitable in the 'sick care system' that we call a health care system." Another simply reasoned: "We can't expect support for Chiropractic care while the pharmaceutical companies run the world."

While many individual medical doctors are trying to overcome years of brainwashing and work cooperatively with DCs, the majority of them, and the organizations that represent them, would love us to disappear from the face of the earth. We're not only competition for health care dollars, we're a threat to the very sickness paradigm they promote.

Why, then, do we permit blatantly anti-chiropractic insurance companies and 'health plans' to interfere with the relationship we have with our patients? Why do we allow our patients to see chiropractic as something they can only receive if their insurance plan pays for it?

This is the mindset we must change if we are to ever break out of our bondage to the third-party payer system. And, we have to do this on two levels.

First, we have to restructure our practices so that we re-establish the doctor-patient relationship. That is, we care for the patient and the patient reimburses us for that care.

For patients with insurance -- they pay you and then they seek reimbursement from their insurance company.

For patients who do not have coverage, we educate them so they value chiropractic enough to pay for it themselves -- the same way they pay for their cable television or their gym memberships.

Doctors have been doing this successfully for decades. Once they get over the initial "pain" of breaking our dependency on third-party payers, they usually find themselves making more money than before. They almost all say they experience far less stress once the insurance factor is removed from their practice.