Marijuana Reimbursement Claims Highlight How Pot Could Be Gold for Employers
August 1st, 2009 By: Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director
A medical billing company may be blowing smoke, but could reimbursing patients for medical marijuana lower drug costs for employers?
By Jeremy Smerd, Workforce Management Online, July 2009
In mid-June, Rhode Island became the third state to legalize the sale of marijuana for medical use, giving momentum to advocates who believe the legalization of the drug offers a dose of sanity for the nation’s costly health care system.
Now that more states are legalizing the sale of the marijuana used solely as a medicine, the next hurdle for reformers who say the drug is more cost-effective than pharmaceuticals is getting those who pay for health care—insurers and employers—to reimburse patients for its use.
The effort to legalize the sale of medical marijuana has focused mainly on whether the medical effectiveness of the drug justifies making it legal to obtain in plant form. The medical benefits have been most closely tied to treating weight loss, nausea, pain, inflammation, spasticity and other symptoms associated with cancer, AIDS, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and arthritis.
Advocates for its legalization say its medical benefits should be made available to ease the suffering of patients. In a nod to the plant’s medicinal powers, pharmaceutical companies have produced synthetic forms of some of its active chemicals.
Less attention, though, has been focused on whether paying for patients’ medical marijuana is a cost-effective way to manage certain illnesses. Advocates argue that marijuana is an effective medicine that can also be a cost-effective alternative to pharmaceuticals.
Read more at ttp://blog.norml.org
