Cara Santamaria

And what we've been talking about up to this point is an intervention like ABA done well, done by the books and done to the highest standard.

Unfortunately, that is not what is often happening in these autism clinics.

So it looks like the main takeaways here, they have to do with, of course, money, doesn't it always?

And they have to do with, let's talk a little bit about potential harm.

So why have we seen an explosion?

I'm talking like thousands of these clinics opening over the past decade when, you know, none or very, very few existed before that.

Well, part of it is that there was a federal requirement that was passed that said that all state Medicaid programs.

Now, remember, here in the United States, we have federal funding for health services that really comes in two major buckets.

There are others as well.

There's Medicare, which exists for individuals 65 or older.

It's sort of our version of a universal health care, but it's for older adults.

And then there's Medicaid, which typically exists for people who reach certain sort of financial thresholds.

So individuals in poverty and often a lot of the programs are dedicated towards children.

Medicaid is interesting because it's a bucket from the federal government that goes to each state to be managed the way they manage.

States manage Medicaid.

Yeah.

So like here in California, we call it Medi-Cal.

We have our own program.

It's partially funded by the federal government, but it's also very much funded by the state government.

There you go.