Is Reiki Covered by Insurance?

Christian Stone | Standing Stones Healing Co.

My Reiki clients are asking me to start taking insurance for the wellness portion of their policies. Is that possible? Will health insurance cover Reiki? Can I bill my clients' health insurance? How does that work?

Reiki is becoming more and more recognized as a legit service, and I believe it's only a matter of time until health insurances in the US start accepting it more widely, like they've begun doing with acupuncture. Do some insurances accept Reiki? Maybe. There are a lot of different types of insurance out there. But most don't. Unless a procedure or service is written in the policy as something that's covered, insurance won't cover it. Of course, insurance companies are happy to deny payment for anything that isn't explicitly covered in a policy, and unless Reiki is specifically mentioned in a policy, convincing an insurance provider to pay for it probably won't work. 

Until Reiki is more widely accepted and begins being covered in the way acupuncture is expanding, we Reiki practitioners would have to work with each specific insurance company on an individual level to get approval for our sessions. This would be no simple or quick thing. Even licensed mental health therapists have a hard time navigating the insurance approval system and mental health therapy is already a recognized and covered service. During the approval process, we Reiki practitioners would need to provide all kinds of documentation of our training, have a fixed amount we receive for a session, abide by HIPAA laws, and etc. In other words, this time consuming process would be a lot of work...and would probably result in denial of approval for coverage, anyway, particularly since Reiki is largely unregulated.

If you have a client who would like to use health insurance to pay for Reiki sessions, the best bet right now is to supply them with a receipt of their session clearly showing the type of service, date, amount, and your business name and encourage them to submit the receipt to their insurance company...or to their flex healthcare spending account provider if they have one. I have heard of Reiki being approved for spending from flex healthcare kinds of accounts. This isn't the same as having insurance pay for it, but it's a great way to use those funds. For those clients interested in having their sessions paid for by insurance, I encourage them to contact their providers and see if they can get reimbursement because why not? Otherwise, for us in our Reiki businesses, I think our time might be better spent in other ways in our business because, given the paperwork involved, this is time consuming and labor intensive with the high probability that approval would be denied, anyway. 

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