Insurance and Reimbursement
For symposium this week, we discussed insurance and reimbursement. I was only vaguely familiar with this topic from what I had learned so far in this internship, so it was helpful to discuss it in more detail. My overall takeaway from this topic is that receiving insurance reimbursement for individual music therapy is a long and difficult process, and typically does not happen in many cases. However, there are ways to make changes to this, but it is based upon individual states, which takes longer. Our hope is that one day in the near future, music therapy will be covered by insurance for all clients, in all cases, and nationwide.
I learned that if music therapy is a part of a health team in a facility, that it can be covered under insurance, due to the whole team being considered health services. Our discussion on this topic included CPT codes and learning that they are service specific, not discipline specific. In other words, music therapy can fall under some of the same CPT codes as other disciplines, such as speech therapy. These are important to note when attempting to receive insurance reimbursement. We also discussed current legislation that is attempting to help promote our field. One example is in California, where it is about to be passed that anyone who claims to be providing music therapy services and is not board-certified will receive a fine of up to $2500. More legislation needs to be passed to recognize our field as a licensed, professional health service, but some recent changes have been heading in the right direction.
-Tara
