I’m a big believer in chiropractics.
I’ve been seeing one again for 12 weeks and the amount of energy I have along with how my body is functioning so much better has made the 45 minutes I spend in their office 3 times a week completely worth it. I haven’t felt this good in YEARS.
Tonight however, I found out that my insurance is no longer covering my visits as I have maxed out the number of visits that I can receive in a year and thus they are no longer going to cover me. Now I can either A) Pay out of pocket to continue to progress (which would come out to $1,620 for 12 more weeks) B) Go at a slower rate of progress (roughly $1,000) or C) Maintain what progress I have made (which comes out to about $500 for 12 weeks).
I may not even be able to afford option C at this point.
The thing about chiropractic that drives me crazy is that it works. The thing that drives me crazy about it isn’t that it works, it’s that insurance companies have very limited coverage for it. The thing about it is that it takes time. It takes time and effort to get your spine re-aligned and to keep it there. It has works wonders for me. I have taken myself off of a daily dose of Claritin, and my astma has also shown signs of improving, I also get and feel sick less often. By seeing a chiropractor, I have the potential to save the insurance company and myself a lot of money. However, that’s over the long run.
That’s part of the problem with American business as a whole. They only look at the short term. What can you do for me this quarter? How can we maximize our profits for this year even if it means hosing the next five?
This is part of my problem with health insurance. And really I even hate that phrase because it’s not really health insurance. It’s emergency sickness insurance. They’re NOT covering you to stay healthy overall, they’re covering you for when you get sick. If they really cared about making sure you stayed healthy they would be working out deals with health clubs to either cover part of your fees or to give you a discount. They would cover more of the things that keep a person actually healthy and well and able to function as a productive member of society. They don’t want to keep you healthy, they just want to keep you from getting too sick to need them too much.
It’s also part of the problem with American health care in general. Our solution to everything is take a pill. Have an infection? Take a pill. Chronic disease? Take this pill. Back hurt? Take this pill. It’s not about actually treating the CAUSE of the problem, it’s about treating the SYMPTOM which doesn’t really take care of what is causing it in the first place. It just covers it up.
Then you take another pill to cover the side effects of the pill you just took. And another one to cover the side effects of that one. And on and on and on.
This is why I wish as part of reforming our health care industry we could also begin to educate people on how to reform the way that we treat illnesses in this country. It’s not about covering the symptoms so that you can go about your day, it’s about getting to the root cause of the problem and solving that.
Then maybe we could actually claim to have the greatest health care system in the world because people would be healthier and happier.
Until that time however, just take this pill.
