Today Marty advocated for the foster care population which would be seriously affected by the proposed changes to the Medicaid billing codes.
Official statement:
Response to Medicaid purposed changes. A Foster Care perspective:
There is a purposed change to the 97153 code to pay the same rate to vastly different credentials- the RBT (Registered Behavior Technician) and BCBA (Board Certified Behavior Analyst) credentials. First, I’d like the highlight to difference in education and experience for these credentials.
· An RBT has a high school diploma, 40 hours of training, a competency assessment, and a board exam. They cannot perform parent training and need supervision and support to appropriately target problem behaviors.
· A BCBA has a master’s degree, has completed 1500-2000 hours of supervised experience, and has passed the BCBA board exam. They can perform parent training and handle any problem behaviors without assistance.
97153 should be separated by credential or there should be modifiers to adjust for the cost of using the more effective BCBA credential.
Working with Foster Care, we have primarily used state funding to service our clients. We recently decided that accepting Medicaid could help more children in foster care access ABA therapy(Applied Behavior Analysis) when private funding is not available. We are currently in the credentialing process, but the purposed changes could seriously affect our ability to service the Foster Care population. In fact, it would be an impossible business model and we would be forced to stop servicing this population through Medicaid all together.
We have found that we can request less hours overall but utilizing BCBAs for most foster care cases. This is because Parent Training is a large component of what we do. A BCBA can assess the situation during any session and incorporate parent training at any time during the session when needed. RBTs are not qualified to assess these situatio
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