This is nothing but bigotry of the highest order. It's no different to this as far as I'm concerned.
I'm aware such costs are studied in the context of a medical model of disability. The underlying assumption of this model is that disability is a burden that should be eliminated/cured. That's about the entire scope of the model. Never mind the track record of the model, or how realistic its goals, considering the inescapable reality that every person in the world will experience disability in their lifetimes, unless they die first.
What I would like to do in this post, nonetheless, is scrutinize the numbers in the report.
Let's start with the $3.2 million figure, assuming a life expectancy of 70 years for an autistic person. This would mean $41,714 is spent annually on the average autistic individual. I don't doubt some parents choose to spend that much in expensive ABA programs and such, but does it seem realistic that this is the average annual expenditure for an autistic from the day they are born until the day they die?
So how does the author arrive at this number? He first looks at estimated direct costs:
Direct costs include direct medical costs, such as physician and outpatient services, prescription medication, and behavioral therapies (estimated to cost, on average, more than $29,000 per person per year) and direct non-medical costs, such as special education, camps, and child care (estimated to annually cost more than $38,000 for those with lower levels of disability and more than $43,000 for those with higher levels).
Medical costs are documented in Croen et al. (2006). The excess annual medical costs for autistic children relative to controls is $1865, due mostly to the prescription of psychotropic medications. But that's for children. What of the lifetime cost? Let's multiply that number by 20, which gives $37,300.
As to therapies, while maybe only 30% of autistic children are put in ABA programs, about 70% seem to undergo speech therapy, which is also pretty expensive. I won't dispute the $29,000 a year figure, but let's see what the lifetime cost might be. How many years are autistic children put through these therapies in average? Let's say 5 years. This gives a lifetime cost of $145,000.
I won't consider expenditures in quackery, as this is not a cost of autism, but a cost of ignorance.
The author also considers indirect costs:
Indirect costs equal the value of lost productivity resulting from a person having autism, for example, the difference in potential income between someone with autism and someone without. It also captures the value of lost productivity for an autistic person's parents. Examples include loss of income due to reduced work hours or not working altogether. Ganz estimates that annual indirect costs for autistic individuals and their parents range from more than $39,000 to nearly $130,000.
The average annual income per person in the U.S. is about $30,000, so right there the figures provided in the article do not make sense.
It appears that about 25% of autistic people diagnosed a generation back work and live independently. But the analysis is about autistic people diagnosed today under current criteria. Let me make an assumption here. About 25% happens to be the percentage of autistic people evaluated as not having mental retardation a generation back. Currently, that's more like 70%. I conclude that about 70% of autistics diagnosed today will live independently and work. (No, I'm not saying that only those without mental retardation work, or that none of those without mental retardation are out of a job -- I'm just using this as an artifact to estimate trends). So if we were to assume that the average income of a working autistic person is equivalent to the population average, annual wages lost per autistic person would be $9,000 a year. But that is a big if. Autistics might tend to have very low wage jobs. On the other hand, they might tend to have very technical jobs which are fairly well paid. Either way, let's assume $9,000 x 40 is lost in wages per autistic person over a lifetime, or $360,000.
There are intangibles which aren't taken into account. How do we quantify the contributions of someone like Temple Grandin to the food industry? Or the contributions of Vernon Smith to, you know, ECONOMICS. Are we allowed to claim Bill Gates? His net worth is $53 billion, a tad more than the purported annual cost of all autistics in the U.S.
What I've estimated so far comes to a lifetime excess cost of $542,300 (minus big intangibles) per person. I do not believe it is anywhere near $3.2 million. Trouble is, a figure that is not in the millions won't make for big headlines.