Harvesting a person’s own or a donor’s bone marrow or peripheral blood for intravenous infusion is called stem cell therapy. It is essentially a healing technique that uses healthy cells from the human body tissues to heal cells that need treatment. Usually, stem cells are taken from the bone marrow or fat tissues for this procedure. Administered directly in the place of injury or where treatment is required, stem cells are directly injected into the patient’s body with injections.
Used for treating a variety of injuries such as, but not confined to, those caused in the knees, ankles, shoulders, spinal cord, back or feet, stem cell therapy is not a very common treatment method yet.
It is still in the experimental stage and insurance companies have varying policies for covering its costs. Because the effects of these treatments are still considered harmful, some insurance companies do not consider it for coverage at all, while there are others who cover the costs of these procedures when they are used in conjunction with other surgeries. Health insurance carriers like UnitedHealthcare offer insurance under certain conditions.
For the treatment of diseases such as acute leukemia in remission for those having a high probability of relapse, resistant non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, recurrent or refractory neuroblastoma, Durie Salmon Multiple Myeloma, the treatments done for patients enrolled in a Medicare-approved clinical study alone, UnitedHealthcare offers insurance coverage.
There is a list of medical conditions and diseases for which the efficiency of stem cell therapy treatment is not sufficiently proven yet. So, UnitedHealthcare does not provide insurance coverage to these and some others are left to the discretion of the Medicare administrative contractor. Usually, patients agree to some of these medical treatments because they have insurance coverage. However, what is exactly covered in the health insurance policy, whether issued by UnitedHealthcare or other carriers, is not easy to comprehend. There is also a growing concern of the command of medicine by companies such as Medicaid and Medicare, that are seemingly buying out physicians. So the path ahead is still hazy.
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