An extremely small nit to pick... "Pregnancy care" could, in theory, be limited to "...providing good massage treatment and instruction on muscle strengthening, posture, etc." Pregnancy is a killer on your lower back, for simple and obvious reasons. So that could be a totally appropriate application of "chiropractic" care.
As for the rest of the quackery, and the issue of who pays for it, I'm not quite so sure. It seems to me that chiropractic implements the placebo effect, and if they can do that as effectively but more cheaply than real medicine that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is also the whole issue of attention-seeking and hypochondria. The lonely attention-starved elderly person goes to her chiropractor and gets "adjusted," or she goes to her internist and gets an MRI and $1000 of lab work for her imaginary symptoms. Which one would you rather pay for?
cathy 
as a DO who did an allopathic residency because he was stunned at the stupidity surrounding manipulation during medical school i would like to offer the following:
1) manipulaion didn't start with chiros. it started in this country in 1892 in kirksville mo. it was promoted by the founder of osteopathic medicine, a.t.still. a.t. was by all desciptions at least half showman and maybe more. nevertheless he had many devoted patients, some of whom were quite famous, including mark twain. in 1893 he failed a student named palmer, who went up yo iowa and started a school based only on manipulation, hence the "palmer" method of chiropractic. all manipulation is based on the unproven belief that disease in the body can be diagnosed and treated in the spine.
2) in do schools there is wide variation in osteopathic manipulative therapy (OMT). some schools teach it for 2 quarters and wave students thru. in kirksville it's taught for 6 quarters and difficulty with it will fail you out of school. there are at least 10 different terminologies in omt, all describing the same thing and all equally ambiguous. in descibing our omt exams we used to say the questions remain the same, it's only the answers that change.
#3) chiropractic schools spend approx 2 years on manipulation . the other 2 years are spent on marketing, and no one does it better. additionally, chiros are much smarter about political influence then physicians have ever been or ever will be. they are absolutely rigid in refusing to condemn or discipline their members, no matter how egregious the behavior. we currently have a chiro in our small town who practices rectal and vaginal manipulation to treat asthma. there have been dozens of complaints to the chiro licensing board and multiple lawsuits and no action has ever been taken against him.
4) in defense of manipulation, there are some patients who get relief from it, but i can crack the entire human body in 20 minutes and there is nothing in musculo-sketetal medicine that requires maintenace adjustments. that's just marketing and some do's do it, too. i don't, and in fact, i try to avoid doing manipulation, because it's very addicting to patients. once they find out you will touch them. they keep coming back. says a lot about the isolation of our society.
5) i think what you are seeing is that chiros are effectice politically, they market themselves constantly and they refuse " to eat their own". i think we physicians could learn some things from them.
Thanks for your thoughts. In particular, I am acutely aware of the marketing and lobbying prowess of the chiropractors in this country. Because of the amount of time they spend in school on the business side of things, they are keenly aware of how to work in the business and legislative arenas --- physicians, as it has been frequently demonstrated, are not.
When I was in chiropractic school in the late 70s there was certainly emphasis on how to present chiropractic to the public, and some training in the business aspects of the profession. But "two years of marketing?" Hogwash.
About 10 years after I graduated the AMA started to publish practice management and marketing materials.
Chiropractors get a lot more anatomy than MDs though.
Each state has its own law and its own scope of practice. California's chiropractic licensure law was vehemently opposed by the Cal Med Ass'n and so the chiros of the day took it to the public as an initiative.
Also, since chiropractic couldn't merge into mainstream medicine the way the osteopathic profession did for many years, chiropractors had to see what could be done with their hands. It is actually a lot.
Actually, part of the reason that there is so much variety in chiropractic, and that chiropractic developed as an independent profession IS the AMA.
Years of ridiculous persecution finally culminated in Wilk v AMA et al (for which psychologists and other non-MD professionals should be profoundly grateful.)
In my first year of practice not only did the radiologist at the local hospital refuse to take X-rays at my order (on an older gentleman who had fallen, and refused to see an MD) but, when the films finally got taken, the radiologist --in violation of California law -- refused to send the report to me despite the patient's signed request that he do so!
Part of the testimony in Wilk was from a neurologist who did consults for the late Lorraine Golden DC at Kentuckiana (kentuckiana dot org.) She founded a center for treatment of profoundly handicapped kids, first just with chiropractic--and with amazing results in some cases-- but now multidisciplinary. The neurologist, who did evaluations on the kids Dr. Golden was treating was threatened with the loss of his hospital privileges for working with her. That, and other similar conduct led the court in Wilk to find for the plaintiffs: the AMA was not acting in the public interest but to interfere with economic competition.
So if you're wondering where chiropractic's PR and marketing skills came from, look to the AMA.
Health care is an important aspect to many lives and I hope to see many more individuals covered.
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