Lower Back Pain – Insurance

Transcript

So can’t get sick without having any impact from your insurance. And I know this very well because I’ve had a kidney stone did I know about that. So how will insurance impact your spine? Well, there may be limitations both in diagnosis and in treatment. Typically insurances fall into, we’ll say sort of three broad categories. One brand of insurance or type of insurance doesn’t really care what’s done. It’s just carte blanche to the practitioner, meaning what you and the practitioner come up with, that’s what’s going to be covered. There’s no intrusion. The second group is where there may be small intrusions and that is where you have to jump through certain hoops. An example of that would be that before you get to go on and have your MRI scan, you need to have any inflammatories, and unfortunately, sometimes it’s physical therapy, whether it’s really gonna help the particular issue or not. But most insurance plans are looking for something called evidence of a conservative treatment regimen and generally over at least a couple of weeks before he imaging in a similar vein that may also apply to surgery. In other words, gee, you can’t be just going to surgery because you haven’t been to the physical therapists, you haven’t had injections, you haven’t had this, you haven’t had the MRI or whatever, treatment-wise. Not so much the MRI, but MRI is necessary to go to surgery because you have to have your roadmap.