NEWS - Huffington Post: "Will Schwarzenegger and Obama Require Insurers to Pay for Autism Care?"

The news is from California, but the questions, and the tactics being used, are ubiquitous, so this is a lawsuit worth paying attention to.

Will Schwarzenegger and Obama Require Insurers to Pay for Autism Care?
Jamie Court
Huffington Post, July 1, 2009

Parents of autistic children gathered this morning at Consumer Watchdog's Los Angeles headquarters to announce a lawsuit against Governor Schwarzenegger's administration for allowing health insurers to refuse to pay for Applied Behavioral [sic] Analysis ("ABA"), an essential treatment for autism, in plain violation of the California Mental Health Parity Act.

Independent panels of doctors paid by California had been ruling in every autistic child's case that the ABA treatment was medically necessary [my emphasis], so insurers changed the rules of the game with the help of the Schwarzenegger administration. The insurers simply claimed the treatment wasn't covered, because it was educational in nature, and therefore independent panels of medical reviewers no longer had the power to overrule the insurance bureaucrats. (...)

FULL STORY AT THE HUFFINGTON POST

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