Don't expect this to improve soon as Medicare begins to deal with rapidly escalating costs for basic medical care. Group health insurance is now establishing more rigid limits on chiropractic care and by 1996 look for all care that includes chiropractic to be strictly managed. Personal injury carriers have recently been subject to a tremendous amount of abuse by chiropractors who have egregiously inflated their bills to make up for losses in other areas of their practice. As chiropractic fraud increases, be prepared for a mounting number of arrests of DCs in the next few months. In California, I have witnesses about one chiropractor every one or two months being arrested for some type of fraud charge.
Some people think that chiropractors are being singled out as unjust targets of abuse.
Yet, continuing arrests of pharmacists, physicians, and other health professionals belies this specious argument. Controlling health care costs must involve health care professionals increasing their own self-policing powers. Our job as chiropractors must be to take a more aggressive approach to eliminating the fraud and abuse within our own profession. We must start with our chiropractic boards. In California when a chiropractor is reported by an insurance carrier, a colleague or the general public, that DC is written a letter informing them of the report.