BuckeyeBlog

A mandate that insurance companies must cover services for autistic children was part of the budget passed by the Ohio House. What do autistic services have to do with the state budget? I’m not sure and it seems the Sen. John Carey isn’t sure, either. He wants to remove the mandate so that it can get a more thorough review. That sounds reasonable — the mandate will raise the cost of insurance and shouldn’t be snuck through as part of the state’s budget.

Sen. Carey and other legislators may also want to consider the fact that there is a lack of evidence that many services for autistic children actually produce results:

Medications, new styles of teaching, classical psychological conditioning, physical manipulation, vitamins, diets, special eyeglasses—many kinds of treatments have been proposed and tried, but few have been tested in a rigorous way. Fewer still—some behavioral conditioning methods, a few anti-psychotic medications—have demonstrated some degree of efficacy. Some autistic patients exhibit very difficult patterns of behavior, ranging from simple stubbornness to compulsiveness to screaming to destructiveness to explosive violence. The behavioral changes produced by the few effective treatments make life in social settings (including the home) possible, but we have no idea whether they have any effect on the underlying cause (or causes) of autism or whether they even make severely affected patients feel better. The people who work with autistic clients often come to depend on their own sensitivity and empathy to judge whether a treatment has had a positive or negative impact.

So the House passed legislation that everyone agrees will raise health insurance rates (and likely lead to some people dropping insurance coverage) to pay for services that likely won’t do much good.  That’s pretty poor public policy if you ask me.