An Autism Diagnosis: Still the Key to Unlocking Needed Services?

By Kate Greenwood

Cross-Posted at Health Reform Watch

In a recent, very moving, post about her son’s diagnosis with autism at age eight, blogger Amy Storch writes: “I guess I should mention the obvious — district services for Autism are much more comprehensive than ADHD.” An autism diagnosis should not, as a matter of law, be the key that unlocks needed special education services. Both autism and ADHD “count” as disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (the relevant regulation is here), and the Act provides that a child with either diagnosis who needs special education services is entitled to an educational program “designed to meet their unique needs.” As a matter of fact, though, an autism diagnosis may mean—as it apparently does in Storch’s school district—a more comprehensive program. An autism diagnosis can also be the key to getting necessary services outside of the school setting, through private health insurance.

According to the advocacy group Autism Speaks, 37 states plus the District of Columbia and the United States Virgin Islands have enacted laws requiring state-regulated private health insurance plans to pay for applied behavior analysis and other therapies children with autism often need. As I blogged about previously here, some of these state insurance mandates are relatively broad—New Jersey’s law requires private insurers to cover applied behavior analysis for children with autism, but also to cover occupational, physical, and speech therapy for individuals with “autism or another developmental disability.” Other states’ mandates, however, are strictly limited to children on the autism spectrum. Daniela Caruso of Boston University School of Law writes about Florida’s decision to limit its insurance mandate to children with autism here, attributing it at least in part to advocates’ success persuading legislators to view autism through a “dual frame of beauty and invasion.”

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s requirement that individual and small group health insurance plans cover ten essential health benefits, and in particular its requirement that plans cover “rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices,” promised to ease access to applied behavior analysis and other therapies often needed by children by autism. Habilitative care is left undefined in the statute, but it is defined at HealthCare.gov as “[h]ealth care services that help you keep, learn, or improve skills and functioning for daily living,” for example “therapy for a child who isn’t walking or talking at the expected age.”

There is a wrinkle, however. As Michelle Andrews discusses in this article at Kaiser Health News, applied behavior analysis and other therapies might fall into the category “rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices,” but a case can be made that they also fall into another covered category, “mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment.” This is of significance because if autism therapies are habilitative services, they can be subject to non-dollar limits, for example limits on the number of hours or units of service that an insurance company will cover. If they are mental health services, then the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 would apply and such limits might not be permissible.

In her article, Michelle Andrews highlights a bulletin issued by the Connecticut’s Insurance Department in April of this year in which it determined that health insurance plans could convert the dollar limit on “behavioral therapy” set forth in the state’s autism insurance mandate into non-dollar limits. The Insurance Department wrote that “[b]ecause the behavioral therapy benefits are classified as habilitative benefits, they are not considered subject to mental health parity. This is consistent with HHS guidance and with the approach taken by other states.”

Connecticut’s autism insurance mandate defines “behavioral therapy” as “any interactive behavioral therapies derived from evidence-based research, including, but not limited to, applied behavior analysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, or other therapies supported by empirical evidence of the effective treatment of individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, that are: (A) Provided to children less than fifteen years of age, and (B) provided or supervised by (i) a behavior analyst who is certified by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board, (ii) a licensed physician, or (iii) a licensed psychologist.” There may be a meaningful difference between “behavioral therapy” and mental health services, but it is not obvious to me from the statutory definition.

Could this be a case where the autism diagnosis functions to limit access to services, however categorized or defined? Michelle Andrews quotes Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services as follows: “The parity rule seems to say you can’t play games like this.”

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