Backing Black pays off for chiropractors.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: TAR HEEL TATTLER

Forget Bank of America. Never mind Microsoft. The investment Tar Heel chiropractors made in Jim Black makes blue chips look like cow chips. For a modest amount, they got a law that has returned millions of dollars in business.

After meetings with three chiropractors in restaurant bathrooms between 2002 and 2005, Black pocketed $29,000--a figure the former speaker of the N.C. House's lawyer disputes as too high--then championed a law lowering health-insurance co-payments for chiropractic visits. That's on top of $11,000 in legal campaign contributions a watchdog group says he received from 2003 to 2006 from the chiropractors political action committee.

Black slipped the law into the state budget bill, and some legislators say they didn't know they were voting on it. The year-old rule still rankles health insurers, which use tiered co-pays to nudge patients away from specialists. "Chiropractors wanted to be called specialists, so that's how we treated them," says Lew Borman, spokesman for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

Now co-pays to visit chiropractors can be no higher than for primary-care physicians. Cumulative data is hard to come by, but in just the Blue Advantage plan, which covers less than 10% of Blue Cross' 3.4 million Tar Heel customers, the law increased costs $8 million last year. From March, when it went into effect and most co-pays dropped from $40 to $20...