Ask the Chiropractor- will medicare cover chiropractic services? Dr Hulsebus explains how it works. Dr Bob Hulsebus helped pass the medicare bill in the 1970's. Dr Mike Hulsebus defended chiropractic patients rights to care i the 1990's. Dr Brant Hulsebus now works to improve the bill. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor- will medicare cover chiropractic services? Dr Hulsebus explains how it works. Dr Bob Hulsebus helped pass the medicare bill in the 1970's. Dr Mike Hulsebus defended chiropractic patients rights to care i the 1990's. Dr Brant Hulsebus now works to improve the bill. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hi, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, and welcome to another edition of our podcast here that we call "Ask the Chiropractor". I started this podcast because all too often I'll see an article, or maybe a little local news media, talking about a story about chiropractic care. They'll go in, they'll talk about what the chiropractor does, they'll interview the patients, they'll see the results the patients get, and then, when they go back, they tell you never go to a chiropractor until you check with your family doctor first. And I'm here to be the one to tell you your family doctor has no idea what chiropractors do. The majority of them are totally clueless on what chiropractors do, and so they're not the experts. So, I started this podcast about chiropractic where I answer questions about chiropractic. Why? 'Because I'm a chiropractor, and I actually know the answers. It's the same thing if you had a problem with your teeth, you wouldn't ask your family doctor, you'd ask your dentist. So, this week an interesting thing came up where someone was asking me about Medicare. Does Medicare cover chiropractic? Or I'm on Medicare, can I go see the chiropractor? And let me give you the answer. The answer is yes. Medicare does cover chiropractic adjustments for the correction/detection of vertebral subluxation. What did I just say? Well, again, you can go to the chiropractor, Medicare says there's actually no limit. Those of us who are our chiropractors know that at a certain point we'll get audited, and have to go in front of a judge, and defend our case. But, in reality, you can go to the chiropractor, you can definitely start chiropractic care. So, the way the whole system works is that it pays for you to go to the chiropractor, have your spine looked at, and get a chiropractic adjustment to correct what we call a vertebral subluxation. What's a vertebral subluxation? It's when one or two bones can get misaligned, or get under stress, and that stress will hit that joint, and that joint then will affect the nerves coming out of it, and wherever those nerves go. And so, a chiropractor finds those spots, he does a vertebral adjustment, usually with his hands, maybe with an instrument, and then, after the adjustment's performed, the subluxation is reduced, and your health should get better and be slightly restored. And so, that's the word of Medicare. Medicare says we're allowed to adjust subluxations. Now, here's a catch in Medicare, because it's government, so it can never be that great, or that simple, or that easy. The catch with Medicare is that we have to demonstrate a need for your care. And there's a couple different ways that chiropractor can choose to demonstrate your need of care. One is by imaging. If you have an x-ray, or an MRI, or any type of imaging of your spine, we're allowed to use that to demonstrate that we use this to help us detect vertebral subluxation. That's what they help you do, they help you detect it. That's up to the chiropractor still to find it, but the x-rays and the imaging give us a big clue of what's going on. And those x-rays and imaging that we use are only good for one year according to the federal government. So, if you come in today, and have your x-ray taken, I can use that as a reference for the next 365 days until we come back around again. And then after that we'll have to take some new images. Another example is you can go and just have a chiropractic evaluation, or a chiropractic exam. And this is an exam that we have to go pretty thorough, all the way through all kinds of different tests and range of motions, and do all this stuff. And that would be good probably for the immediate diagnosis. What does that mean? Well, in January I went to the chiropractor because my neck hurt after I woke up, I had a really bad, stiff neck. He did an exam on me, he did an evaluation on me, and he determined that I probably have a vertebral subluxation in my neck, therefore I can go get it adjusted several times. Well, after about my fourth or fifth chiropractic adjustment, my neck was better, the exam showed I improved, and now I'm dismissed from that diagnosis. Fast forward to July, I'm outside in the yard, I'm doing some yard work, I go to get up, my lower back hurts. Now, I cannot use that same exam I used in January about my neck to cover my lower back. I'll now have to have another evaluation, and management, and examination of my lower back in order to document the necessity of care to justify Medicare's requirement for me to prove that there's an injury, or what we call vertebral subluxation. That's the word Medicare uses also. And so, by detecting the vertebral subluxation, either by the imaging or the exam, is fine, but the exam is only good for the immediate condition. Where if I did the same thing like I just talked about, in January I hurt my neck, in July I hurt my lower back, the x-ray would be good throughout, so now it's throughout, so now this covers me from January through next January, I can injure myself three or four times. We don't recommend injuring yourself three or four times, but now you could injure yourself three or four times and still be okay. That's how the Medicare works. So, here's the loophole, here's the catch, it all sounds too easy so far. Medicare does not cover the cost of either the x-ray imaging, or the exam. So, when you go to the chiropractor, Medicare will not reimburse us to taking your imaging, or for performing the exam. Now, what if you've had images done somewhere else? Can we use those? Absolutely. So, if you went to your primary doctor, and your primary doctor took x-rays of your spine, your primary medical doctor, or if you went to the emergency room, or wherever you might have gone, and they took images of your spine, can you bring those to the chiropractor? Yes, we can use those, but we had to go by the date the image was taken, so if the image was taken two years ago, and you walk in with it today, we can't start counting today, we go back to that two years and we'll have to take new ones, or get new ones ordered. Now, if you went to another doctor, and the doctor did an exam of your spine, the doctor determined you had a subluxation, go to the chiropractor, can you use that exam? No, because only chiropractors are trained to detect and correct vertebral subluxations. So, you'd have to go into a different chiropractor and have that exam, and the odds are that you probably wouldn't go chiropractor to chiropractor for the one exam. Matter of fact, if you tell me you went to Florida, you hurt your back, you got your lower back adjusted, the chiropractor did an exam, you brought the exam finding to my office, because now you're back from Florida, and you're back in Illinois, and you wanted me to use that doctor's exam, that probably wouldn't fly, we'd probably have to do another exam. So, in my office we use imaging, because if you took my image, and you went to a chiropractor in Florida, you'd be covered. If you took my exam, you went to a chiropractor in Florida, there's a good chance your exam would not be covering your visits. So, we do imaging here, and the images are good for one year, and not only that, but when you look at having four or five exams during the year, a set of images is not only quicker, faster, but it also makes more financial responsibility to take the images. So, our chiropractor is able to take images of your spine? Absolutely, we're trained to take your x-rays, read the x-rays, find what's going on, and take care of you. But, again, x-rays are x-rays, no matter where they come from, we can use them as long as they are within one year. Now, the good news is we're rapidly trying to change this law, we're working together, I just got back from a weekend with the International Chiropractic Association, otherwise known as the ICA. The ICA is a very equivalent to the AMA, the American Medical Association, but for chiropractors. The ICA is international, though, so we don't just stop at our borders, we help our Canadian brothers, we help out our friends in the Caribbean, all over the world, we had representatives there from Australia at our weekend meeting, and we're working all different kinds of legislation throughout the world. Now, myself, I know quite a bit about this Medicare stuff because of not only who I am, but from where I come from, my grandfather was one of the chiropractors that helped pass the Medicare law to get chiropractors into Medicare back in the early 1970s. Then in the late 1990s Medicare kinda came knocking at my dad's door, and challenged my father about the documentation parts, the x-ray parts, and whether or not what he was doing was legit. He went to Washington, DC, testified in a congressional hearing at Capitol Hill, and he was able to get them to define this clear as day, and prove that he had done nothing wrong. And now we know for a fact this is a requirements, and myself, I have served as the legislative chairman, the Medicare chairman, on the International Chiropractic Association, and I'm now part of a special team, where we're getting a new bill passed, our new bill that we hope to pass will cover your x-rays and your exams through Medicare, like everything else. If you're interested in learning more about this bill, or how you can support this bill, go to chiropractic.org, you'll see the spot there, you can learn more about it, and, of course, if you wanna make a donation to the PAC fund to help us get this going, we'd love to have that. It affects everybody. Even if, like right now, I'm 48 years old, I'm gonna be on Medicare some day, I hope it covers it for me when I'm there. So, it's a good way to get involved, a good way to help your chiropractor help with that. That being said, I hope I answered your question, whether or not Medicare covers chiropractic. The question we get sometimes on this is, hey doctor, can you order my x-rays? Medicare is set up very uniquely, that only your primary doctor can order you to do anything. It's nothing to do with chiropractic, it's just a Medicare rule, everything must go through your primary. And the example would be if you were at a cardiologist, and you felt like your heart thing isn't really a heart thing, it's more of a respiratory thing, the cardiologist can't send you to the respiratory doctor. The cardiologist has to call your family doctor, and the family doctor then referring to the respiratory doctor. They can't go back and forth, they have to have that visit in between. That's just the way Medicare's set up. So, I can't order you imaging, I can call your family doctor, and ask your family doctor to take images for you, and see what happens. Me, personally, we have not been very successful on that because a lot of the doctors that I work with in this community, well, they think I'm wrong on this, for some reason. They believe they know more about the Medicare laws than I do, and almost every chiropractor. I get calls every day from chiropractors around the country asking for help in Medicare law, so I think I know pretty well, having the different positions and my family lineage, so that's just kinda the way it works. So, if you have a question about chiropractic, or whether or not your Medicare, or your health insurance covers chiropractic, you can always contact my office if you're in my area. If you're not in my area, and you wanna ask somebody else, ask all the chiropractic clinic you go to, and ask them how it works, ask them whether or not they take it. Not every chiropractor works with insurance. Too many insurance companies restrict too much of what we try to do, and limit us, and often do bad things, we've seen them come back for patients three, four years later after they receive care at our office. So, some of those companies, we just won't work with. And it might be an inconvenience for you today, but in the long term we're doing that for a reason. But, again, call your local chiropractor, every state's a little different. Medicare's a federal program, so that's pretty much the same throughout America. But every other state has their own state and regulations, so call your local chiropractor and ask them the questions. Remember, ask the chiropractor, though, they know more about the chiropractic insurance than anybody else does, because they deal with it every day. And if you have another question about chiropractic, or chiropractic care, go ahead and leave me a comment below, stop at our website, so I'm trying to say our website, rockforddc.com, that's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D dc.com. And you can leave us a message there too. Other than that, I hope everyone stays healthy, stays strong. And remember, if you have a question about a chiropractor, or chiropractic care, always ask a chiropractor. All right, everybody, keep smiling. Thanks.