Paying for Alternative Medicine: The Role of Health Insurers

Robert Tillman
Additional contact information
Robert Tillman: St. John's University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2002, vol. 583, issue 1, 64-75

Abstract: In the early 1990s, Americans spent an estimated $27 billion on alternative medical treatments. However, most of those expenditures were paid out of pocket rather than by health insurers. This article reviews empirical studies of third-party coverage of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and the factors behind the reluctance of health insurers to provide benefits for those treatments. This reluctance is based on three principal factors: a lack of scientific evidence supporting CAM providers' claims of medical efficacy, the absence of credentialing standards for many CAM providers, and difficulties in fitting CAM treatments into typological schemes that determine levels of reimbursement by health insurers. Possibilities for overcoming these obstacles to the integration of CAM into the American system of health insurance are discussed.

Date: 2002
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271620258300105 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:583:y:2002:i:1:p:64-75

DOI: 10.1177/000271620258300105

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().