Provide names of other journalists involved.
Maura Lerner
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
04/03/11, 04/04/11, 04/08/11, 08/18/11
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Digging into hundreds of pages of state Medicaid records, reporter Maura Lerner revealed that the state of Minnesota has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a handful of expensive autism therapy centers to treat the children of certain well-connected families, while denying the same care to poorer families and insisting that state rules don’t allow Medicaid to pay for the care. Her two-part series also documented that the therapy, known as Applied Behavioral Analysis, is no more effective than other, less costly treatments.
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
Lerner filed multiple public-document requests to obtain payment records for Minnesota’s Medicaid program. The spreadsheets allowed us to specify the amount of money the state paid to ABA providers, even while state officials insisted they didn’t know the number, and document that hundreds of other families had been denied comparable coverage.
Explain types of human sources used.
Top officials of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, several parents of autistic children, two attorneys who sued the state, several Minnesota autism treatment providers and some of the nation’s top academic autism experts.
Results:
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services initiated an investigation into Minnesota’s autism payment practices. An influential committee chairman in the Minnesota Legislature conducted hearings on the same topic, and the state Commissioner of Human Services ordered an internal review of payment inconsistencies. In December 2011, the state told several private insurers that it was overhauling its payment practices for autism treatment.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
We have not run any corrections or clarifications.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
If you file document requests for Medicaid payment records, be prepared to file them again and again until you get what you want. And when you get them, be prepared to spend hours trying to understand them. Seek the help of outside experts– lawyers or retired public officials– in interpreting the data.