The long-term objective of this project is to measure the effect of health insurance benefit structures on the composition of the population that uses complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers, the medical conditions for which patients seek care from CAM providers, the extent of CAM provider use, expenditures for CAM and conventional provider care, and selected indicators of medical quality. The purpose of this is to examine the role of CAM providers in the health care marketplace. How to finance this role is an important and controversial health policy issue. Public payers such as Medicare and Medicaid fund very little CAM, but this is changing. Private payers have feared that including CAM providers in third party payment would come with enormous additional expense. And all payers have wondered how to control the CAM benefit if adopted. This study will be performed in a health care marketplace with a fully integrated CAM insurance benefit. The effect of traditional methods of cost-sharing such as co-payments, deductibles, and coinsurance on the utilization of CAM provider services will be determined. The effect of increased CAM provider coverage on total health care expenditures will be calculated and an estimate of cost offset (did CAM use likely replace some other service) will be made between CAM use, conventional care, and among CAM services. Selected measures of preventive medical such as childhood immunization will be calculated to determine if CAM users receive the same level of preventive medical care as non-users of CAM. This project will answer key questions about the financial and health care quality consequences of CAM integration into third party payment. This will provide essential information for any health care organization, public or private, that is considering the coverage of CAM providers. Since the United States is the world's number one consumer of medical care, this study on the addition of new CAM benefits and the consequences is important. ? ?
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