Military Children & Autism

I recently read the beginning of an article, I believe it was in Time magazine or US News, about Military children and Autism. The article stated some statistic about the nation's average diagnosis of Autism was around 1 in 150 births, while in Military children it was diagnosed in about 1 in 88 births. The Author of this article made this sound mysterious and shocking. I didn't read the rest of the article because I went off on a rant about the ridiculous nature of that assumption, which leads me to the reasoning behind this post.

Military children, as stated in the same article, are insured under a system called TRICARE. With "diagnosed" being the key word here, I have to point out that when you compare a group of individuals with medical coverage with an entire nation struggling with healthcare costs, of course there are going to be more covered individuals with medical diagnoses of Autism than those in a group without consistent coverage. Too add to this in further, being a Mom, myself, if I were raising my children on foreign soil with exposure to God-knows-what and we're medically covered you can bet my kids are seeing the Doctor more than recommended and beyond that what else would I feel safe to do in all that spare time?

It just makes sense to me that kids exposed to foreign foods, diseases, animals, people, etc,, are going to see the Doctor a lot more and people with medical coverage visit the Doctor a lot more than those without. And so it stands to reason that those children would have more diagnoses than the rest of our nation's children.

I specify children on purpose, too, because we're much more concerned about our children's well beings than normally (as a society) we are about our own. That would explain the diagnoses in children with Autism as opposed to adults with varying illnesses.

I bet they have less ADHD too. Why? Because it's a symptom of Autism.

I didn't finish reading that article so don't hold it against me if you've read it and it made the points I made, but by the beginning of the article it certainly didn't look like it was heading this way.

The main point of the article was about a Military wife advocating for her Autistic children because TRICARE won't cover certain types of Autism and the poor family had over $100,000 out-of-pocket expenses on their Autistic kids medical expenses and they blew a bunch more money suing their child's school to get their daughter special treatment. I mean special classes. I think.

Oh yeah, those medical expenses, the ones mentioned (as far as I got into it) were speech therapy. The reason TRICARE refuses to pay for speech therapy is because the company classifies that type of (non-)benefit as educational and not medical.

I have to agree with the Military wife, because that's a load of crap. The same arrogant crap has kept my children from continuing speech therapy as well. We didn't get $100,000 in the hole about it though. My kids can't talk right and we only owe about $700-$800.

:/