Welcome to the DisAbility Rights Idaho Blog!
Public Policy Watch
Parents of children with developmental disabilities (DD) in Idaho should be concerned about the proposed rules for redesigning Medicaid children’s DD services. Idaho’s main Medicaid service for children with disabilities, developmental therapy, is being replaced with several new services. These new services include respite care, and habilitation supports. Habilitation supports are services designed to provide assistance to children with DD to participate in age typical activities in their homes and community settings. This service is different from the current developmental therapy because there are no requirements for clinical goals, behavioral measurements or recording of data. This is a needed service and it makes sense to have an option for children with DD that just provides some support and supervision without all of the clinical structure and trappings. Although children will certainly learn new skills by participating in community activities along with their peers, the service is not specifically designed to teach new skills or to address changes in behavior.
The service designed to teach skills is called intervention. Intervention is included in the new design but it is restricted to children who meet an institutional level of care (formerly called ICF/MR level, now called ICF/ID).
I think this is a very bad idea. Many children with DD could be excluded from all access to to Medicaid services designed to teach important skills or deal with challenging behavior. One source in the Department says that they believe that this will exclude about 15% of all children with DD in Idaho, but since the decision is made on an individual basis, it is hard to predict what will happen for any particular child.
Young children who may need this type of intervention the most will be told to wait until they get much further behind before they can have the service. The best practice is to provide intensive services early to prevent children from falling further behind their peers. Check out the new rules and submit your comments before September 22, 2010.
There are other problems with the rules to lengthy to go into here, but you can see our official comments posted on the DRI website. https://disabilityrightsidaho.org/ .