Arizona Senate panel OKs health coverage for traditional healing
- An Arizona Senate panel unanimously approved a bill to cover traditional healing under the state’s Medicaid program.
- If passed, Arizona would be one of the first states in the nation to have traditional healing covered by Medicaid.
- Proponents of the bill believe that traditional healing practices will lower overall health care costs and improve long-term health outcomes.
A state Senate panel unanimously approved a bill that would make Arizona one of the first states in the country to cover traditional healing as part of its Medicaid program.
Senate Bill 1671, sponsored by Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, D-Tucson, would appropriate $1.3 million from the state general fund for the 2026 fiscal year to help finance the new benefit, which would extend to traditional health care practices like sweat lodges, prayers, songs and talking circles that are provided by an Arizona tribal facility.
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in October approved traditional healing as a covered benefit for four state Medicaid programs — Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and California. Arizona is the only one of those four states that requires legislative approval for its benefit to become effective. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is expected to sign the benefit into law if it’s passed by the full Arizona Legislature.
Arizona’s Medicaid program is called the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System or AHCCCS (pronounced “access”). It is a government health insurance program primarily for low income people that provides coverage to about 2 million Arizonans. AHCCCS, which is often neutral on proposed state laws, is in favor of SB 1671 and worked with tribal leaders and traditional healers in getting federal approval.
Gonzales’ bill had bipartisan support in Wednesday’s state Senate Health and Human Services Committee hearing. Proponents of including traditional healing as a covered Medicaid benefit predict it will result in cost savings and long-term health benefits.
‘I had to heal myself before I healed others’
Members of several Arizona tribes testified that traditional healing is a legitimate health intervention. John Tsosie, a traditional healer from Fort Defiance, Arizona, has been working on getting federal approval for nearly a decade because he said he knows the value of traditional practices in helping patients overcome problems like historical trauma, substance use disorder, chronic pain and grief.
Dr. Naomi Jean Young still remembers the emotional and spiritual trauma she felt dissecting a cadaver as a young Navajo medical student at the University of Arizona.
“The hardest to dissect was the face. It was literally a skeleton looking at you,” said Young, now the CEO of the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Board Inc., which operates three health facilities on Navajo Nation land. “The refrigerator-cold room, the smells of formalin, and visions of dissection led to nightmares.”
A traditional healer performed a short cleansing prayer for her and she continued to be a recipient of traditional healing ceremonies and prayers until graduation, Young told the Senate committee.
“As traditional Navajo we believe in physical, mental, emotional and spiritual balance,” Young said. “Gross anatomy shattered this balance. I needed help. … I had to heal myself before I healed others.”
Young said that by allowing reimbursement for traditional healing, such programs will be able to grow and become sustainable.
AHCCCS defines traditional health care practices as the “sum total” of knowledge, skill and practices based on the “theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.”
Thomas Edison Yazzie, a traditional Navajo practitioner at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center, said that traditional healing is vital to many older tribal members. But younger tribal members are asking for it, too, he said. Yazzie said doctors at the Winslow facility continuously refer patients of all ages to him.
“There are youth who are very hungry to learn our ways, and come to us for advice and that sort of thing,” Yazzie said. “It’s just been growing every year for the past eight years that I’ve been there.”
Both Tsosie and Yazzie worked with AHCCCS officials for nearly 10 years to gain federal approval for the traditional healing reimbursement. Part of the reason it took so long was because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yazzie said. But it also has been a process to get non-Indigenous people to understand the value and effectiveness of traditional practices, he said.
Traditional Indigenous medicine considered a crime for nearly a century
For nearly a century, the 1883 federal “Code of Indian Offenses” criminalized traditional medicine and Indigenous cultural practices by creating courts that prosecuted Indigenous people who sought health help from medicine men and medicine women.
The law had the long-term effect of marginalizing traditional rites and healing, and was not fully reversed until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed, according to Dr. Donald Warne, who is co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and is also the former health policy research director for Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona.
The first four states approved for the program will be important for proof of concept, for showing that traditional healing is clinically effective and cost-effective, too, Warne recently told The Arizona Republic.
American Indians and Alaska Natives have significant health disparities when compared with the general population. Among other things, they have the lowest life expectancy at birth among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health says.
“We can absolutely have an impact on disparities by incorporating traditional medicine,” Warne said. “We have some programs that provide traditional healing but in a very limited capacity, or sometimes there will be a grant-funded program that allows for traditional services. … The way to make it sustainable is that ongoing reimbursement.”
Reach health care reporter Stephanie Innes at [email protected] or follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @stephanieinnes.
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