SANTA FE (KRQE) - Research shows autism treatment not only works its crucial to get started early.
But thousands of state workers don't have any insurance coverage for autism , and that forces families who have kids with autism to make tough decisions.
A loophole in state law means certain health insurance plans for public employees dont have to cover autism, but a bill introduced at the capitol Thursday is trying to change that.
Shawn Childers, a librarian at East Mountain High, has 6-year-old twins. One has autism, the other does not.
Most weekdays, she takes her son to therapy.
We currently have occupational therapy through swim, we have ABA - applied behavioral analysis, we have done behavioral therapy and we really push speech therapy, she said.
Because Childers is a public employee, her family pays thousands of dollars for her sons treatments each year.
Childers also spends countless hours on the phone with providers and her insurance company to work to get similar diagnoses for her son like developmental speech delay so that a fraction of the therapies are covered.
There are hundreds of families affected and each one has a different story. There are families that don't do therapies because they have no coverage whatsoever. There are families that take out second mortgages and there are families that declare bankruptcy.
There are also numerous anecdotes of public employees who have considered quitting their jobs to qualify for Medicaid - because Medicaid covers autism and their insurance plans did not.
Read more from the original source:
Mom works to close autism loophole