Steve Salerno does an excellent job in his Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article The Touch That Doesn’t Heal. In this article he points out some of the myths surrounding treatments that are not grounded in science and exposes them to the skeptical treatment they so deserve.
He also exposes how these pseudoscientific treatments are then passed on to insurers using rather dubious and self serving interpretations of the Current Procedural Terminology codes used to bill third parties for medical services.
This is an article well worth reading and should serve as a wake up call to the third party payer community who should be far more concerned with reducing true fraud and abuse rather than arbitrarily reducing reimbursement to all providers across the spectrum.
Well done Mr. Salerno and let’s hope that policy makers now endeavoring to clean up the mess that our healthcare system has become take notice.
