The Cost of Autism....Too Many Families Have More Than One Child With Autism. Watch this CBS News Story on Autism June 21, 2009

This link is a story about a family with three children diagnosed with autism, which is too close to home for us. What really saddens me is that this is becoming way too common. I know that some people think that people who have children with autism must have had something wrong with them to produce children with such defects and so don’t worry about people like us. But let me tell you…. it CAN happen to anyone! The statistics are real, the ratio’s are growing substantially, the pain is real and lonely and the cost is astronomical! I don't even keep track of what we pay for our kids' therapy because it would be too devastating.

All we do is try to mainly focus on the benefits and results they are getting from our therapy of choice and worry about how to pay the bills later. We are lucky, however, because we don't have a mortgage and currently own our house outright. I shudder to think what it would have been like should we have had a mortgage, especially given the fact we are on the pension because Shane suffers chronic and debilitating migraines and I had to leave my career in Human Resource Management to care for the kids and manage their therapy, etc, etc, etc.

Even though this story applies to American health insurance, the situation is not much better here in Australia. Our kids need hours of therapy (40 hours of one-on-one therapy a week they say), which we would exhaust all our insurance and Medicare benefits in just weeks if we paid someone to do this. My family's only choice was that I leave my respectfully paying job to do the therapy myself. All I get for the 40 hours of therapy x 3 (=120 hours) each week is approx $275 AU. On average, it costs $100 AU an hour for a therapist. Therefore, my time is worth $12,000 per week and a staggering and unbelievable $624,000 AU a year. WOW..... IF ONLY!

Heartbreaking to know that families are doing work worth this kind of money only to lose their homes and everything they have. I can't tell you how much this situation saddens me. God Bless all the families who are facing this type of crisis and God Bless all families & individuals living with ASD. Allison xxx
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5101616n