State regulators are violating mental health and other laws by allowing health insurers to deny effective treatment for children with autism, consumer advocates contend.
In a lawsuit, Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica group that monitors insurance practices, is asking a judge to order the Department of Managed Health Care to require insurers to provide autistic members with the services their physicians have ordered.
Without court action, the suit says, "California's thousands of autistic children and their families will continue to suffer."
The department said it was "holding health plans accountable to provide a range of healthcare services for those with autism" and was handling consumer complaints according to the law.
Insurers also insist that they are following the law and reimbursing policyholders for most autism care. The dispute centers on certain kinds of expensive therapy and whether a 1999 law requires insurers to pay for them.
Autism impairs communication and socialization and is often accompanied by repetitive, injurious behavior.
Insurers have long declined to pay for a variety of behavior-modification therapies, such as applied behavior analysis, because of the expense -- as much as $70,000 a year per child.
More than 37,000 children with the most severe cases receive services, such as applied behavior analysis, through the state. Because the state's limited budget for such children is rationed according to the neediest, thousands more suffer debilitating problems but are ineligible for state aid.
Applied behavior analysis involves a trained therapist working individually with a child for up to 40 hours a week. The therapist teaches skills, such as feeding oneself, by breaking them down into small steps and drilling them with positive reinforcement.
The battle over autism treatment is at least a decade old. In 1999, in response to widespread outrage over insurers' refusal to cover such needs, the state Legislature adopted the Mental Health Parity Act.
The law requires insurers to cover care for mental and behavioral problems at the same level as they do for physical illnesses.
Still, insurers continued to avoid paying for applied behavior analysis -- one of the most expensive autism therapies -- by denying requests on the grounds that it hadn't been proved effective.
