· · ·
· · ·
· · ·
Email This Article
OPM Issues Another Denial
| Feb 17, 2006 |
| Although under new leadership, the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health plans for federal employees, has again chosen to side with the insurance industry on the issue of providing coverage for ABA (applied behavioral analysis) for children with autism.
Like her predecessor Kay Coles James, the current OPM Director Linda Springer is calling ABA "investigational" and "experimental" in an apparent effort to spare insurance companies within the Federal Employee Health Benefit system the burden to provide coverage for ABA. To support her case, Springer, a former insurance executive herself, cites some studies that recommend more research on the efficacy of ABA, but ignores widely published data identifying ABA as one of the few known effective means in the treatment of autism. Back in 1999, then US Surgeon General David Satcher, writing about the efficacy of ABA, already came to this conclusion: "Thirty years of research demonstrated the efficacy of applied behavioral methods in reducing inappropriate behavior and in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social behavior." That Mrs. Springer or her staff did not come across any of the research on which Dr. Satcher based his opinion is hard to believe. Needless to say, Mrs. Springer's opinion will not go unchallenged. |
Attachments: OPM ABA Response 01-06.pdf
|
![[Get Acrobat Reader]](/newsmanager/images/getacro.gif){kind=small}
Copyright © 2010. ABA Therapy Coverage Campaign. All rights reserved.