Does Medicare pay for Somatics treatments? What about private insurance companies or HMO's?
Insurance companies will sometimes pay for Clinical Somatics treatments. This has been inconsistent and largely on a case-by-case basis. Our policy is for clients to pay out-of-pocket (like they do for many kinds of manual therapies), and then we provide them with what documentation they need to get reimbursed by their insurance provider. We are working to get Clinical Somatics covered by all insurance companies across the board.
By the way, insurance companies that actually bother to do the math on the cost-savings of Somatics tend to become very interested in paying for Somatics. One example of this is a Workerís Compensation insurer who reviewed their clientís file, and saw that the only relief she ever got from the back pain that kept her disabled and out of work was the one session she had in Somatics. Once they realized this, they immediately began paying for more Somatics treatments.
These kinds of stories are all good news, because it shows that one of the major routes to achieving insurance coverage is simply getting insurance companies to understand the clear bottom line advantage that Somatics provides.
On the other hand, even without insurance coverage, Somatics is a clear value for clients, and is relatively affordable even in absolute dollar terms, compared to other options for their conditions. Remember that the number of visits required for Somatics to resolve a problem is generally much shorter than for other treatments for the same condition. Clients may only pay a $10 to $40 co-payment for a chiropractor or physical therapist, but the amount of visits they will have to go to means they usually pay more out-of-pocket for those practitioners than they will pay us in full at $100+ per session. We have clients — from upper class to working class — who have paid us $300 or $400 to get complete relief from their problem, after they had already paid a physical therapist or massage therapist $700 (out-of-pocket, after insurance) and were still in pain.
I think this is another example of the win-win equation of Somatics. Itís a great deal for client and corporation alike. Even with clients paying full prices (which are lucrative to Somatic Systems), the relative costs are low for them. And for many conditions, Somatics gets clients out of pain or other problems that nothing else — no matter what it costs — could help.
