About the presentation:
Attorney Lorri Unumb will discuss the patchwork of autism services and funding streams that exists across the United States. Medicaid rates for ABA services vary dramatically from state to state; terms of coverage in state insurance laws vary; behavior analyst licensure laws are different in different states, or sometimes non-existent. Within the ABA context, significant variation exists from state to state on issues like where services can be delivered, through what age is funding available, and the extent to which caregiver participation is required. Significant variations in policy from payer to payer will also be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to describe differences in state autism insurance laws
- Participants will be able to describe reimbursement rate variations among the states
- Participants will be able to identify how payer policies vary in ABA
About the presenter:
Lorri Shealy Unumb is a lawyer, mother of three teenage boys, and an internationally renowned autism advocate. She began her career as an appellate attorney with the United States Department of Justice and then as a full-time law professor. Following her son’s diagnosis with autism, she began volunteering for autism causes, writing ground-breaking autism insurance legislation for South Carolina (“Ryan’s Law”) that passed in 2007 and served as the catalyst for the national movement toward autism insurance reform. She served for a decade as the national head of state government affairs for the international nonprofit Autism Speaks. Lorri is also the founder of the annual Autism Law Summit, now in its 14th year, and is co-author of the law school textbook “Autism and the Law.” In 2010, she founded the Autism Academy of South Carolina, a nonprofit ABA center now known as The Unumb Center for Neurodevelopment.
For her local, national, and international advocacy efforts, Lorri has been recognized with
- the NASCAR Foundation’s Betty Jane France Humanitarian Award;
- the Miss South Carolina Pageant “Woman of Achievement” Award;
- the Jefferson Award for Public Service (Charleston, SC);
- the Professional Women in Advocacy “Excellence in a State Campaign” Award; and
- the Civitan International World Citizenship Award.
Her work has been profiled on CNN, on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and in Town & Country magazine, from whom she received one of three 2009 “Women Who Make a Difference” awards. She is also profiled in the American Academy of Pediatrics 2013 book “Autism Spectrum Disorders: What Every Parent Needs to Know.”