SAN FRANCISCO – As a parent of a 10-year-old son with autistic, dental and medical issues, Christina Clark knows how critical it is for her son to remain on health insurance.
The 12 hours of behavioral therapy he gets each week for autism could cost around $2,000 a month, which the single stay-at-home mother of two says would bankrupt her in a trice. Depending on the diagnosis and treatment intensity, behavioral health treatment could cost upwards of $60,000 per year per person.
Clark and thousands of parents with children diagnosed with autism could very well spiral into bankruptcy if President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican supporters make good on his threat to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s signature legislation that passed in 2010. The law was designed to guarantee health insurance coverage for all documented Americans. Since its launch, some 20 million more people nationwide have been insured.
California, which was in the forefront of implementing the law’s provisions, stands to lose $20 billion in funding from its repeal, $16 billion of that for Medi-Cal, the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people known as Medicaid elsewhere in the nation.
There are currently 4.6 million Californians whose health coverage is funded by the ACA — popularly know as Obamacare — either through subsidized insurance purchased on the online health insurance marketplace called Covered California, or through Medi-Cal. One in three Californians is covered by Medi-Cal.
Even after Obamacare launched, mental health care advocates had to fight hard to get behavioral health included in the law’s so-called “10 essential benefits” that all insurers have to offer, according to Kristin Jacobson, California policy chair of the nationwide non-profit, Autism Speaks. Additionally, Obamacare expanded mental health protections and anti-discrimination policies for people with autism.
“The ACA has played a very significant part in covering mental health and disability services,” Jacobson observed.
She said that insurers in only 29 states — California among them– offer behavioral health treatment benefits for autism through their marketplaces.
