08 June 2011

Tricare Health Benefits

For the last 17 years we've had no problems with Tricare- health insurance for military.  But now that we have a child who is special needs/autistic, we're finding out they aren't so helpful in this area.  I think they're doing better than they have in years, but I also feel they could be doing more. And I'm reading about several other military families with Autism who aren't having such a good experience with Tricare either.
We PCS's here last fall and were doing fine until this spring when the current meds weren't working for our child.  We had really bad rages and nothing was getting through to this child.  We contacted the Tricare office and were given 2 names of child psychiatrist/psychologists.  The psychologist wasn't accepting any new patients, so we've gone with the psychiatrist- which is good because we don't have to go to a third party to manage any new medications. 
He's told us that he thinks she has Aspergers, but this Dr doesn't believe in labeling children and won't give us a definitive diagnoses. Right now he's simply managing symptoms.  I totally get it, but to start a new IEP with the school- our current 504 isn't working well enough- or to access services that Tricare will cover, we need a diagnosis. 
So I had to go back to the Tricare office and find out if they had any referrals for autism/aspergers specialists.  They do but they're about 45 minutes away.  So we start a whole new process over again.

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