2
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      The role of the health insurance industry in perpetuating suboptimal pain management.

      1
      Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.)
      Wiley-Blackwell

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Unlike pain practitioners, health care insurers in the United States are not expected to function according to a system of medical ethics. Rather, they are permitted to function under the business "ethic" of cost-containment and profitability. Despite calls for balancing the disparate agendas of stakeholders in pain management in a pluralistic system, the health insurance industry has continued to fail to take the needs of suffering chronic pain patients into consideration in developing and enacting their policies that ultimately dictate the quality and quantity of pain management services available to enrollees. This essay examined these self-serving strategies, which include failure to reimburse services and certain medications irrespective of their evidence-bases for clinical efficacy and cost-efficiency; "carving out" specific services from interdisciplinary treatment programs; and delaying and/or interrupting the provision of medically necessary treatment. Blatant and more subtle strategies utilized by insurers to achieve these ethically questionable goals are examined. Additionally, this essay addressed some of the insurance industry's efforts to delegitimize chronic pain and its treatment as a whole.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Pain Med
          Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.)
          Wiley-Blackwell
          1526-4637
          1526-2375
          Mar 2011
          : 12
          : 3
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Foundation for Ethics in Pain Management, Bellevue, Washington 22203, USA. jgiordano@potomacinstitute.org
          Article
          10.1111/j.1526-4637.2011.01061.x
          21332933
          3ed14466-c3fe-4e9e-8923-154ad5c8b902
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article