After attending a seminar on doing business with third party payers (insurance companies) I have become inspired to start searching for answers for the profession.

What is going on is that for the most part we are all uninformed as to what we are responsible for in doing business with the insurance companies. The contracts are so complex and not easily understood that we need an attorney to decipher the details. Without being properly informed the risk of committing insurance fraud is such a great risk. Insurance fraud is a Class C felony punishable by 5 years in prison and $5000 fine for each count not to mention the cost of hiring an attorney to defend yourself.

In that seminar I also learned that the only way to be able to work with these companies to make changes is to work through an association or union. While we do have a few associations, they are not strong enough or united enough to provide the support and knowledge that we need to be efficiently informed particularly when doing business with insurance companies.

What needs to happen from what I see right now is that we need to define medical massage and define it so that all types of massage therapy are included - reiki, polarity, structural integration, trager, swedish massage, reflexology, shiatsu, acupressure, therapeutic touch…every single type of modality has it’s place in medical massage.

I have thought at various times that we needed a type of organization to do just that and I myself do not know much about what it takes to create such an organization. But from what I have just learned we are powerless without it and the insurance companies will continue to walk all over us.

The other part of this has to do with a massage therapists ability to build a cash practice and how the insurance companies make us “fix” people and ignore healing. It also has to do with how we value ourselves as individuals and as profession. Are massage therapists turning to insurance companies when they can’t make a sustainable living with cash clients? What will it take to educate the public about the benefits of massage enough so that they understand that they have to take responsibility for their health and leaving it up to insurance companies who’s sole reason for being is to make a profit?

I don’t know the answers to these issues but the one thing is that we need to start thinking about these things and set aside our excuses and differences and decide what it is that we want for massage as a profession.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Insurance Billing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.