SACRAMENTO Evan Kim was 2 years old when he was diagnosed as autistic last year, and his parents searched for some way to curb his head-banging tantrums.
Using a state-financed healthcare program for low-income families, they found therapists who could provide a specific kind of autism treatment aimed at analyzing and improving behavior. The therapists spent 40 hours a week with Evan at the family's home in the Los Angeles area, coaxing him to stop the tantrums and improving his communication skills.
Evan's mother, Jenny Kim, was relieved until last month, when her children's healthcare plan changed and the therapy, known as applied behavior analysis, was no longer covered.
"I'm afraid he's not going to make any progress from now on," Kim said. The same service, she said, would cost $10,000 a month out of pocket.
Evan's therapy was a casualty of the state's effort to phase out its Healthy Families insurance program and shift the nearly 900,000 children it covered into Medi-Cal, the broader healthcare program for the poor. Despite officials' assurances that the transition would not jeopardize services, activists say hundreds of children are losing coverage for applied behavior analysis.
"Those are the families that fall through the cracks," said Julie Kornack, a public policy analyst at the Los Angeles-based Center for Autism and Related Disorders. "If they don't get the treatment they need, they won't be contributing members of society. And everyone will have to pay to take care of them."
Activists fear that other coverage gaps could surface as the state prepares to move the final 150,000 children into Medi-Cal in the next two months. Elizabeth Abbott, an official at the advocacy group Health Access, said she worried that dental resources could also become strained.
"This is potentially the tip of the iceberg," Abbot said.
Rene Mollow, a deputy director at the California Department of Health Care Services, said the transition has been mostly smooth. She said some children can get similar autism therapy through a federal program or local school district, but she conceded that those services won't be available to everyone.
Lawmakers agreed to eliminate Healthy Families last year as a savings measure pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown, but the money hasn't materialized the way the administration had hoped. The state saved only one-fifth of the $13.1 million it had projected in the fiscal year that just ended.
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An autism treatment lost in California's shift from Healthy Families