Boston, MA – A Boston company J.P. Morgan Chase and Company is paving the way for other American companies to have health cover for autism.
Announced in late November, it means that employees with autistic children will be given financial help to aid with expensive and life long therapies for their children including ABA (applied behavioural analysis). The company joins another ten banks that have signed to provide the employee benefit.
The lifetime costs of treating one person with autism could top $2.3 million, according to 2012 research from the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics, which makes insurance companies highly reluctant to add autism health benefits to their packages.
Many insurers, however, still categorize ABA as an experimental treatment, because of a lack of long-term research on its effectiveness, and have largely refused to cover it. School districts must offer some services for school-age children, but parents often bear much of the expense.