In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the day-to-day challenges facing autistic people and their families. As many posts have discussed, the challenges are especially great for military families.
Berkeley Lovelace Jr., Jason Kane and Erin McLaughlin at NBC:
ABA helps children with autism to develop important life skills, said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“It’s all about breaking things down into smaller steps, and then also providing the appropriate reinforcement for things,” Halladay said.
“This is how we all learn, by the way,” she added. “We all learn to go to the potty by somebody reinforcing us by going to the bathroom on the potty. We learned to be on time by people reinforcing us and giving us positive accolades for being on time. Kids with autism, they get it more intensely and they get it more directed based on the skill they need help with.”
Most states have mandates requiring private insurers to cover ABA or other behavioral interventions for children with autism, Halladay said.
Those mandates, however, don’t apply to the federal government, including federal programs such as TRICARE, she said. (Some federal programs do cover the therapy for children, including Medicaid and the Federal Employees Health Benefit, the government’s health insurance program for federal employees, retirees and their families.)
In 2021, Kristi Cabiao started a nonprofit called Mission Alpha aimed at pressuring both TRICARE and members of Congress to restore broad coverage of ABA. She lobbied Congress for an independent study reviewing the effectiveness of the therapy, which was launched that same year and conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Last September, the group published a 336-page report affirming that ABA should be included as a basic benefit under TRICARE, without the excessive administrative barriers that have disrupted treatment for children in military families.
The report stated the evidence to support ABA therapy “is robust” and meets “the Department of Defense’s own criteria of reliable evidence.”
