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Financial Aid

My head is spinning trying to research this so I am hoping someone to help. Long story short, my husband is self employed and we are self insured. Our health plan leaves a lot to be desired. We've been paying for speech and OT out of pocket for 3 years and when our second child needed speech as wel, tthe cost became overwhelming. This fall, Ben needed an ambulatory EEG, a second EEG, and a sleep study and now we are looking at our third hernia surgery in three months (deep breath). We saw Ben's developmental ped last week and she stressed that we need to ramp up speech therapy again - we took a 'financial break' from private therapies the past several months. She said MA has non-income based help for kids with an ASD dx. What help, if any, is there in NH? Is there help that is non-income based or income adjusted? He needs the additional therapies! TIA

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Permalink Reply by Gayle Provost on March 6, 2012 at 1:11pm

You could apply for Home Care for Children with Severe Disabilities (NH CHC-CDS) (AKA: Katie Beckett) Here is a link to a fact sheet. http://chad.dartmouth-hitchcock.org/documents/pdf/katie_beckett_fac...

If approved (depending on your childrens needs and diagnosis) it would give your chldren medicaid as a secondary insurance that will pick up some of the cost your insurance isn't covering. It IS income based...but based on your CHILDS income, not yours (social security, bonds, savings accounts etc). It took us 3 months to get an answer. My son was approved, my daughter wasn't. (He's a bit more severe on the spectrum than his sister). It covered our co-pays for all his therapies and the payment for the copays was back dated to the date of the application. In otherwords they paid the copays we had already paid during the 3 months we waited for our application to be approved, and we ended up with a credit on our account for the sum of all those copays. It's worth a shot.

We use Easter Seals and they have a decent payment plan too (don't know if that helps). We have been with them for 2 years and I'm very happy with them.

I'm sure there are grants you could apply for, or maybe use some discretionary funds for it??

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Permalink Reply by Michelle Abbott on March 15, 2012 at 10:03pm

I think Gayle had great advice. My husband is also self employed. We also had extremely high out of pocket expenses. We actually benefited changing insurance plans although we paid a much higher monthly premium. In addition, we also got approved for Medicaid which helped a lot too.