One of the many state laws that took effect on July 1 requires the Department of Human Services to study the affordability and efficacy of providing alternative medical treatment<\/A> (acupuncture, herbal remedies, etc.) to people enrolled in Minnesota’s health care programs. The original bill was sponsored by Jim Abeler, a Republican and a practicing chiropractor. Abeler believes that subsidizing alternative treatments could save the state substantial amounts of health care dollars. I find the strength of those claims suspect. Based on my own admittedly anecdotal evidence, alternative remedies complement more traditional treatments rather than wholly replacing them. <\/FONT><\/SPAN><\/P> I’m not opposed to providing access to alternative treatments for those who couldn’t otherwise afford them. However, I’m not sure that the state should view all alternative treatments as equal. Some therapies, such as acupuncture, seem to yield more tangible results than other treatments like massage. I’m also uncertain whether practitioners of alternative medicine would be willing to put up with the bureaucracy and regulation that is attendant whenever seeking payment from a public entity. Of course, a legislatively mandated study is just as likely to collect dust on some bureaucrat’s shelf as it is to inspire further action, which means the expansion of health care benefits to include alternative treatments is anything but certain. <\/FONT><\/SPAN><\/P><\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the many state laws that took effect on July 1 requires the Department of Human Services to study the affordability and efficacy of providing alternative medical treatment (acupuncture, herbal remedies, etc.) to people enrolled in Minnesota’s health care programs. The original bill was sponsored by Jim Abeler, a Republican and a practicing chiropractor. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-kq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}