Access to adequate insurance coverage for ABA services is one of the most consequential advocacy issues in the field today. Two laws — the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) and California's Senate Bill 855 — create a legal framework that ABA providers must understand not only to protect their clients' coverage rights but to advocate effectively within the insurance ecosystem.
Provider: BehaviorLive
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Join Free →There are two laws – one at the state level and one at the federal level – that offer significant benefit to California practitioners and consumers seeking insurance coverage for ABA. One is the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which passed Congress in 2008 but is only recently seeing enhanced enforcement for the benefit of consumers, and the other is California Senate Bill 855, which became law in late 2020. Join us for a practical legal discussion tailored for the ABA community on the protections offered by these laws. Learn what insurance practices are prohibited and what you should do if you encounter such prohibited practices.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Lorri Shealy Unumb is a lawyer, mother of three young adult boys, and an internationally renowned autism advocate. She began her career as an appellate attorney with the United States Department of Justice and then as a full-time law professor. Following her son’s diagnosis with autism, she began volunteering for autism causes, writing ground-breaking autism insurance legislation for South Carolina (“Ryan’s Law”) that passed in 2007 and served as the catalyst for the national movement toward autism insurance reform. She served for a decade as the national head of state government affairs for Autism Speaks and since 2019 as the CEO of The Council of Autism Service Providers. Lorri is also the founder of the annual Autism Law Summit, now in its 19th year, and is co-author of the law school textbook “Autism and the Law.” In 2010, she founded the Autism Academy of South Carolina, a nonprofit ABA center now known as The Unumb Center for Neurodevelopment. In 2025, she founded “Unumb Place,” a residential program for adults with autism.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.