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This phenomenon isn't unique to either the USG or even the supernatural.
In China, a lot of the insurance system covers Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is pretty much just bullshit. Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance. Acupuncture is also something apparently covered by many private insurance companies, despite also being highly suspect. Some apparently are even covering Reiki now.
Point here being that interest groups who believe they're effective push hard for their inclusion and treatment as "real medicine" and there's not really a strong lobby against it. It's not like you'll gonna be able to convince the TCM/Chiropractic/Acupuncture/Reiki/etc believers otherwise that easily after all, they're passionate and committed in a way that opposition isn't. If you have a bunch of people who really think that crystals or halo therapy or whatever are better than normal mainstream medicine, then you have a lobby pushing for their inclusion.
Because there's a bunch of very very passionate people in support, I don't expect spending and focus on ESP, or "super foods" or ghost hunting or whatever other nonsense to end anytime soon in the same way that coverage of (what I consider to be bullshit) "traditional medicine" and other beliefs is being actively expanded by insurances. It's just part of living in society, sometimes you have to accommodate what you personally think is bullshit because large numbers of people believe it.
You might think "well just ban things that are stupid and bad" but the monkey paw curls and all of a sudden the vaccines are banned. Whoops, turns out other people have different views on what is stupid and bad.
I’ve sometimes wondered why a lot of domestic insurance programs in the US refuse to cover medical tourism operations abroad, when the expense is often much cheaper. It’s not all cosmetic that’s done elsewhere (although a lot of it is). Probably regulatory related if I had to guess. Not to speak of the logistics.
In the event of a complication can exponentially blow up if you're stuck in another country
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None of this is bullshit, these techniques obviously work and I have benefited from them as well as millions of other people. If they didn't work, people wouldn't use them or pay for them, obviously.
Even if it's just 'placebo', whatever that actually means, the techniques work.
This is not obvious. You can sell something that does not work at all, not even as a placebo, as long as your buyers are uninformed enough.
Suppose I know that a certail illness passes on its own in about a week in most cases, but my target audience doesn't. I could sell them a treatment that doesn't hasten or lighten the course of the illness in any way, then claim credit when after a week, the illness does indeed pass.
Being a valid placebo requires that there is a measurable benefit from the sugar pill compared to no treatment.
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That is only true if the only thing they're selling is the efficacy. But it's not. What draws people to these sorts of bunk medicines is the vibes. The naturalistic fallacy, the appeal to "tradition" and "ancient wisdoms", feeling like they have some sort of secret knowledge (the same sort of thing that draws flat earthers or 9/11 conspiracies and the like), anti corporate beliefs, or blind hope for solutions that we don't currently have in the same way that people will pay psychics to find their lost child, and other reasons like that.
I'm sure there are some things somewhere that modern medicine is overlooking, but in general the saying "you know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine" is the general truth. It's not like they're opposed to the idea of herbs or mushrooms or other stuff having healing properties, most modern meds are literally based off that stuff! Even the newest discoveries like Wegovy are based off real world natural substances, like the gila monster venom.
If it's just placebo then it pretty much by definition doesn't work. It's entirely just your mind and outlook doing everything there.
The vibes are strong and time-tested. AIUI, acupuncture is a very powerful placebo.
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If you set the threshold for success as low as a placebo then your answer is built directly into the assumptions of the argument. The standards for medical efficacy are generally much higher than that, which is why a lot of it is bunk. At the very least none of it has proved worthy of repeated scientific scrutiny and came out with flying colors on the other side.
A decent chunk of 'modern medicine' is likely gonna hit a similar wall when looked at with a couple decades worth of hindsight, though. I do agree that a lot of TCM etcetera is placebo and correlations =/= causation but the amount of modern medicine that's been pushed and shaped for ideological reasons like 'gender confirmation' is indicative that the field isn't really as serious as it ought to be.
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