Published: Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 11:03 p.m. Last Modified: Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 7:28 a.m.
As the number of children with autism grew in the 1990s and 2000s, Florida parents pressured the state Legislature to require employer-funded insurance policies to pay for behavioral treatments and loosen the requirements for Medicaid coverage.
For parents of children with autism, applied behavior analysis (ABA) is considered the gold standard for helping their children learn to fit into the world.
The treatment is marked by intensive work that, in essence, rewards good behavior and ignores bad.
In 2008, Florida became the fourth state to mandate coverage.
But there's a problem: While ABA therapists can be found in some larger Florida cities, large swaths of the state have no one with the proper training.
"How tremendously frustrating it is to finally get the coverage, and then not find anyone who could do the therapy," says Sharon Boyd of Port Charlotte, whose son Austin, 13, was found to be autistic a decade ago.
"It's like they decided to cover it, but didn't put a system in place to provide it."
Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 in 88 children in the country has an autism spectrum disorder, no one knows for sure how many of them live in Florida.
Data on prevalence was last reported by the CDC in 2008, with an estimate of 1.5 million people with autism nationwide, and included only a handful of states.
Here is the original post:
Autism help, and challenges along the way