Does the availability of chiropractic care improve the value of health benefit plans? With annual national spending on spine-related problems estimated at $85 billion per year, chiropractic care can play a major role in lowering health costs and making health benefit plans more cost-effective.
The Association of NJ Chiropractors (ANJC), one of the largest state organizations in the country with more than 1,500 members statewide certainly feels it does from its own members’ experiences and is hoping congressional representatives, as they work on health reform, take notice of a new report showing the impact chiropractic care can have on total health care spending.
According to the report prepared in October for the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress (www.foundation4cp.com), chiropractic care has an incremental impact on population health and total health care spending. Written by Niteesh Choudry, MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School and Arnold Milstein, MD, MPH, Mercer Health and Benefits in San Francisco, the report was commissioned by the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress to summarize the existing economic studies of chiropractic care published in peer-reviewed scientific literature and to use the most robust of these studies to estimate the cost-effectiveness of providing chiropractic insurance coverage in the United States.
"The prevalence of lower back and neck pain as a common health condition is a major drain on health care resources," said Steven Clarke, President of the ANJC. "As this new report outlines, health benefit plans that include chiropractic coverage are cost-effective in nature as they not only provide better health outcomes but reduce the cost of health care spending overall for such conditions for patients seeking chiropractic treatment."
A survey in 2002 showed 26% of U.S. adults surveyed reporting back pain in the previous three months and 14% neck pain. Low back pain alone accounts for 2% of all physician office visits, with only routine examinations, hypertension and diabetes resulting in more.
Executive Summary of the Report:
Low back and neck pain are extremely common conditions that consume large amounts of health care resources. Chiropractic care, including spinal manipulation and mobilization, are used by almost half of US patients with persistent back-pain seeking out this modality of coverage.
The peer-reviewed scientific literature evaluating the effectiveness of US chiropractic treatment for patients with back and neck pain suggests that these treatments are at least as effective as other widely used treatments. However, US cost-effectiveness studies have methodological limitations.
High quality randomized cost-effectiveness studies have to date only been performed in the EU. To model the EU study findings for US populations, researchers applied US-insurer-payable unit price data from a large database of employer-sponsored health plans. The findings rest on the assumption that the relative treatment with and without chiropractic services are similar in the US and the EU.
The results of the researchers’ analysis are as follows:
Effectiveness: - Chiropractic care is more effective than other modalities for treating low back and neck pain.
Total Cost of care per year:
- For low back pain, chiropractic physician care increases total annual patient spending by $75 compared to medical physician care.
- For neck pain, chiropractic physician care reduces total annual per patient spending by $302 compared to medical physician care.
Cost-effectiveness: - When considering effectiveness and cost together, chiropractic physician care for low back and neck pain is highly cost-effective, represents a good value in comparison to medical physician care and to widely accepted cost-effectiveness thresholds.
Steven Clarke commented on the analysis by stating:
"While this report is certainly not meant as the definitive study of the cost-effectiveness of chiropractic care on health benefit plans, it certainly provides our representatives, who are crafting the new health care policy, pause to recognize the positive value chiropractic care provides to patients from a treatment perspective and economically to overall health care spending."
For additional information or to locate an ANJC member doctor by town or zip code, visit the Association of New Jersey Chiropractors’ website at www.njchiropractors.com or call (908) 722-5678.