Habilitative and rehabilitative services and devices are mandated as essential health benefits (“EHB”) in Section 1302 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), Pub. L. 111-148. It is critical that the regulations on the EHB package explicitly establish appropriate coverage of these benefits in a manner that is consistent with the intent of the statute and the needs of people with disabilities and other conditions that require habilitation services and devices. The Habiltiation Benefits Coalition was established in August 2011 and works to ensure habilitation is established appropriately in the essential health benefits package.
The HAB Coalition is a group of organizations who are independently active in their support for habilitative services and devices. The coalition coordinates, sustains and aggressively promotes a unified voice that has had, to date, a material impact on the contents of the federal guidance that states are using to make decisions involving EHB, particularly around habilitation benefits.
The mission of the Habilitation Benefits Coalition is to coordinate and leverage advocacy for coverage of habilitation benefits in the essential health benefits package that all individual and small group private insurers must offer starting in 2014, as well as ensure the implications of the contents of the EHB package on the benchmark plans offered under the Medicaid program as well as the benefits that are protected under lifetime and annual cap prohibitions are not unjust for habilitation.
