Why Insurance Won’t Cover Stem Cell Therapy

Name: Why Insurance Won’t Cover Stem Cell Therapy
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T20:15:03+00:00
Duration: 47 s
Channel: Dr. Charles Mok
Description: Short YouTube commentary (Dr. Charles Mok) explaining why insurance companies lag in covering new medical treatments. Uses knee replacement as a concrete…

17 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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0:47

Short YouTube commentary (Dr. Charles Mok) explaining why insurance companies lag in covering new medical treatments. Uses knee replacement as a concrete example: total cost ~$70–100k, ~2% major morbidity/mortality rate, and some patients have persistent post-op pain. Argues insurers must consider actuarial impact and that an FDA-approved, insurance-covered stem-cell therapy for knees could greatly increase utilization and overall costs.

Questions this video answers

Approximately $70,000–$100,000.

About 2% (approximate).

Chapters

One of the questions is, why don't insurance pay for it? Insurance typically lags substantially behind new breakthroughs and treatments. Not because they're evil or anything like that, but it's just like that. It's lag. The other thing you got to consider, the threshold for a knee replacement surgery is pretty high. It is an expensive surgery all in. It's about 70 to 100 grand in terms of the entire cost related to a knee replacement surgery. It's got a significant major morbidity mortality rate that's clinically significant, maybe up 2%. And then there's a certain percentage of people who still have pain afterwards because of nerve injury, etc. So it's not the perfect surgery, but it's the best one right now. So most people don't go through knee replacement that are eligible. However, if we had an FDA approved stem cell that your insurance pays for, pretty much everybody that has knee pain is going to get it done. You're not to have a low threshold for doing it. That's going to cost a lot of money. So they got to look at it from an actuarial standpoint. Are they really willing to put this much money into.