One way that you can successfully market PT is by simply pointing out to appropriate stakeholders that you can “get a lot of PT for the price of one MRI”. Even payors will acknowledge by virtue of their threshold of approving certain surgical conditions that a trial of PT must first be attempted that there is low downside economic risk of PT.
This advantage is perhaps an angle that we can leverage as the political issues on the future health care becomes further debated. We need a strong push towards the economies and savings gained by use of PT vs. drugs, surgery, imaging. Is future health care cost a big concern for the US Government? Absolutely. Look at this chart from the Congressional Budget Office:
Sources of Growth in Projected Federal Spending
on Medicare and Medicaid (Percentage of GDP)
What is more concerning to the CBO is the extent to which spending per beneficiary exceeds the growth of the economy. This basically means that although the effect of aging will increase the overall spending in health care, it is negligible compared to the fact that increased spending on a per person basis will occur in huge proportion (read more meds, more technology, more surgery on a per person basis). The director of CBO, Mr. Peter Orszag, who maintains his own blog (really good if you like this kind of stuff) and recently had an oped in WSJ over the same topic appropriately points out:
The gains from higher spending are not always clear, however. Substantial evidence exists that more expensive care does not always mean higher-quality care. Medicare costs per beneficiary, for example, vary substantially across the United States for reasons that cannot be fully explained by the characteristics of the patients or other factors — and the higher-spending regions don’t generate better health outcomes, on average, than the lower-spending ones. These types of research findings suggest that embedded in the country’s central long-term fiscal challenge are opportunities to reduce health costs without impairing health outcomes overall.
The timing for broader implementation of EBP and studies justifying the cost-effectiveness of PT could not be better-or more pressing.
Thoughts?
