Medicaid Fraud
What it is: As Medicaid spending on autism services has grown, so has fraud: billing for therapy hours never delivered, services rendered by unqualified or unsupervised staff, falsified treatment plans, and “phantom” patients. Federal and state investigators have brought a growing number of cases against fraudulent autism-service providers in recent years.
Why it matters to our community: Fraud isn’t a victimless accounting problem — autistic children are the victims. Every dollar stolen is an hour of therapy a child never received. Fraudulent providers warehouse kids while billing for treatment, crowd out legitimate providers, and hand ammunition to those who want to cut Medicaid autism funding altogether. If we want lawmakers to sustain and expand funding for ABA and other services (see #6), our community must be the loudest voice demanding that the money is spent honestly. Defending the program means defending its integrity.
Our position: Americans for Autism Advocacy supports aggressive detection and prosecution of Medicaid fraud in autism services: provider credentialing and supervision standards, audits that verify services were actually delivered, whistleblower protections for staff and parents who report fraud, and swift exclusion of bad actors. Strong anti-fraud enforcement is pro-funding — it protects the program our families depend on.
