Effectiveness evidence is great, and the creation of practitioner certification was an important milestone in the development of applied behavior analysis (ABA), but really it was third-party pay systems that built ABA into the relative behemoth that it is today.
The primary third-party pay mechanism in the U.S. is health insurance, and ABA is expensive. With the nation struggling to make financial sense of its patchwork health care policy, eventually hard questions were going to be asked about the cost of ABA… and those questions are being asked now. Although many of you in the autism trenches probably already have a finger on the pulse of third-party payment, I’m passing along a clear, balanced, and depressing story from NPR (“It’s the ‘gold standard’ in autism care. Why are states reining it in?“) that describes efforts by many states to limit how much ABA Medicaid will pay for.
So much of behavior analysis has been propped up with autism dollars that this is something we should all be talking about and working on. A lot of the needed action will take place at the state level, so it’s important that behavior analysts share ideas and strategies. If you have links to additional information or resources for advocating for continuing ABA coverage, please post those in the Comments section below.