Age bin

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When it comes to services for people with communication handicap, Vicki Gibbs and Autism Spectrum Australia have it precisely backwards. The problem isn’t that some children who had been diagnosed with autism have now been reclassified as having a social communication disorder and don’t get funding for therapy.  The problem is that children with autism get services that aren’t available to people with identical needs whose communication handicaps spring from other disabilities. Funding should be on the basis of need, not the basis of diagnosis, and people with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or diagnoses of intellectual disability need communication therapy just as much as people with autism do.  The correct remedy is not to reclassify a few but to include the many.