ICS Behind the Scenes

The Illinois Chiropractic Society is working behind the scenes to protect your practice and ensure your voice is heard. From policy to insurance, we’re advocating for you every step of the way.

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Transcript:

At the Illinois Chiropractic Society, we’re constantly working behind the scenes to protect your practice, to advance the profession and to make sure that your voice is heard where it matters the most. We just wanted to bring you up to speed on a couple of things that are happening and maybe some things that you may have missed over the last six months, specific to just advocacy efforts that maybe you’re not aware of. For example, we are continually monitoring and looking for opportunities in the multitude of lawsuits that are happening around the country. For example, the lawsuit against multi-plan right now that is addressing what we also believe are anti-competitive measures that they’re taking and that’s being handled at the court level. In fact, many of you probably didn’t even realize that the Department of Justice at the federal level has recently made comments to the courts supporting the furtherance of action in this particular case and ensuring that anti competitive practices aren’t continuing, and so we monitor those types of things to make sure, again, that your voice is appropriately heard.

Also, if you’re not aware, recently, the Department of Justice has also launched an anti competitive Task Force, of which they’ve asked for feedback, they’ve asked for public comment, and we are already working on a way to communicate this on behalf of you in Illinois and also on behalf of the profession as a whole. We’re actively playing a role in those efforts that are being requested, other things that are out there that we’re that we’re following, if you didn’t catch it, United Healthcare and the Medicare Advantage and the prior authorization requirements that began last year, we actually addressed that, went to the CEO of their Medicare Advantage division and addressed this directly with their CEO and asking for changes. Now, there were some changes made earlier this year. We don’t believe that they went far enough, but we believe that our role in that also aided in the advancement and correction that took place by United Healthcare. Again, we don’t believe it was far enough. We still believe that it’s incredibly restrictive. We still believe that it hinders patients’ progress in care, and we’re still opposed to the current policy as it exists by UnitedHealthcare for the Medicare Advantage plan and for many prior authorization programs that are in place because of the restrictive nature and the harm that comes to your patients as a result. So we’re always watching for those opportunities to be able to address these issues when they come up.

Also, if you didn’t catch it, we were an integral part of developing documents to provide your patients to explain these complicated health insurance practices that negatively impact their care as well. And if you haven’t seen those, those flyers, we’ll drop a link to how you can access those flyers to be able to provide them to your patients. We strongly recommend this. Other things that have happened over the last decade that you may not be aware of – did you know that we worked, that the illino Chiropractic Society worked closely with the AMA to address some CPT Assistant language that needed to be corrected in order to help you in your defense, for billing a CMT along with an examination, and why that matters is because insurance companies were using the previous CPT Assistant language as a weapon against our doctors and for support and denying many of those cases. Now we know that that problem still persists, but we believe that the work that we did in 2018 positively impacted that and help correct many of those practices, prevented it from advancing further and continuing to create additional harms to your practice. We’re still working on ways to better that as well and help you in those regards.

Now, this is only just a few items that we’re addressing from a national perspective, from a state perspective, and from a court’s perspective, and we’re always watching these things. But we also want to make sure that you know that over the last decade, approximately 50,000 different pieces of legislation have been introduced in Illinois, and those are also things that we watch, that we scour that we look for how they may negatively impact your practice, or how they can positively impact your practice, and look to make amendments and adjustments that protect you and that help you to be able to help your patients and further the development of your practice. We just want to make you aware of these things that are happening that we do behind the scenes that maybe you weren’t aware of hopefully, this information helps you out and encourages you and why you invest in the Illinois Chiropractic Society and why you should invest in the Illinois Chiropractic Society, we’ll catch you next week.