[westernmom]

At the very least, push for the Medicaid.

I can tell you from experience, our insurance company denied M's mental health benefits. The insurance co. (an HMO) said they had in-house psychologists who could handle his issues. However, they had no one who specialized in former foster child suffering from the effects of severe neglect/abuse. (Heck, I would have taken someone who specialized in abused children - no luck - not a large enough population in this HMO for them to have a specialist).

My point - M sees his psychiatrist every 6-8 weeks for med evals (that's at $120/hour). And his psychologist weekly, that's at $100/hour. Fortunately, he has Medicaid or we'd be paying a boatload of money.

Also, M has sensory integration dysfunction which requires weekly OT. Again, the insurance company denied payment after 6 months as their criteria is to see significant improvement in 2 months (not going to happen). It's about $800/month for OT at the Children's Hospital here.

Also, Medicaid picks up the co-pays for M's doctor visits (not too often) and his medication copays ($60 every 2 months for maintenance drugs) that's $360 a year just for medication.

It adds up quickly. Fortunately, we didn't have to push at all for the subsidy & Medicaid. (Pretty much we got more than I expected.)

My dh did say that if we didn't have either, it would require a significant life style change at our household to get M what he needs (which we'd do in a heartbeat).

In M's case, I look at it as - if the system hadn't sent him back to a biomom twice who'd already had 5 other kids tpr'd & had criminal neglect/abuse charges (among other issues) he wouldn't have most of these issues. This is M's money for the system's screw-up.