Health insurance companies in California will be required to cover treatment for autism under a new law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday.
The measure, written by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, requires health care service plan contracts and health insurance policies, with few exceptions, to provide coverage for behavioral health treatment for pervasive developmental disorder or autism, as of July 1, 2012.
Health insurance companies are not happy about it.
“We are disappointed in the signing of SB 946 and deeply concerned about the precedent it sets for coverage of non-medical services,” says Patrick Johnston, president of the California Association of Health Plans. “At a time when families and businesses struggle to afford health coverage, SB 946 is going to drive up health care costs for families and businesses by nearly $850 million a year by transferring responsibility for educational services to health insurers.”
But advocates for autism treatment disagree on what the newly required coverage might actually cost.
“We have real-life experience over several years in states that have enacted autism insurance reform showing that the impact on premiums is consistently well under 1 percent, or less than the cost of a cup of Starbucks per person per month,” writes Peter Bell, executive vice president for programs and services at Autism Speaks, in an opinion column published Oct. 7 by Capitol Weekly.
Mr. Brown says there are questions about the “effectiveness, duration and the cost of the covered treatments that must be sorted out.”
“Autism is a developmental disorder that appears in the first 3 years of life, and affects the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills,” the National Institutes of Health explains.
