You've done everything right. The successful career, the stable home. You are a competent, analytical person who solves complex problems for a living. So when you get a quote for a four-figure assessment for your brilliant child, your first thought isn't "I can't afford this." It's "Why the hell does this cost so much?"

You have every right to be angry.

The Scale of the Gatekeeping

One of the biggest barriers to a diagnosis is cost — comprehensive assessments can run into thousands of dollars, and coverage for adults is inconsistent: assessment is often covered when medical necessity is documented, but comprehensive testing and out-of-network care frequently are not.

And flat-rate, "one-size-fits-all" pricing ignores the real-world barriers facing autistic people — a group the CDC now estimates at roughly 1 in 31 children — which is exactly why we think it's the wrong model.

The Three Pillars of the Cash Grab

1. The Myth of the "Gold Standard" Test: Predatory practices hide behind expensive, copyrighted test kits like the ADOS-2. They present the test itself as the primary value. But these tools have real limitations: research finds evidence of underdetection of autism in Black children and in girls on some ADOS-2 items, and clinicians themselves warn that the numbers a test spits out can be over-trusted — as one experienced assessor put it, "instruments are good at eliciting information; scores are very dangerous" (Kalb et al., 2022; Coughlan et al., 2022).

2. The Template-Driven Report: The multi-thousand-dollar price tag often pays for a clinician to spend hours copying and pasting generic, pathologizing descriptions from the DSM into a template.

3. The Abdication of Clinical Skill: Clinical judgment is vulnerable to bias — a clinician's expectations and the context of the visit can color how an ambiguous result gets read.

A high price tag is not an indicator of quality care.

Red Flags of a Cash Grab Practice

  • Red Flag #1: Price Obfuscation. They are cagey about the total cost and the hourly rate.

  • Red Flag #2: They Sell the Test, Not the Clinician. Their website talks endlessly about the "gold standard" tools they use, not the clinical expertise of the person using them.

  • Red Flag #3: A One-Size-Fits-All Process. They describe a rigid, unchangeable battery of tests applied to every client, regardless of their unique needs.

Our model is the rebellion. It's built on radical transparency. We charge a simple, transparent hourly rate for all Assessments because we believe our value is in Liz's brain, not in a test kit. When you're ready: Let's talk →

Part of: Cost & Insurance → | Related: The Insurance Shell Game · Assessments