1 in 88. You get what you pay for.

Let's play a little thought experiment. Let's say that you want to do something about all the beer cans being thrown out of cars that are littering the highways. One way you might do something about it is to pay people a nickle to pick up beer cans and bring them in to be recycled.
  We do this for awhile and we want to know if this plan is working, so we start keeping count of how many beer cans get brought in. At the end of the year, 10,000 beer cans have been picked up. Wow. That's a lot of beer cans on the highway. We have a big problem.
  We should put more money into it.
  So next year, to more fully deal with this littering problem, we're going to start paying people a dime. This should solve the problem. At the end of the year we find that instead of 10,000 beer cans turned in, we have 20,000. Something is causing the amount of discarded beer cans to grow. We are facing a problem that is growing at an exponential rate!
  We need to put more money into it!
  Yet, at the end of another year, after we find that 40,000 beer cans have been turned in, we have no explanation for this baffling rise.

  The simple answer that if you increase the financial incentive for people to find things, more of those things are likely to be found does not seem to have occurred to most of the writers covering the latest CDC report that the autism rate has hit 1 in 88.
  In the last few years insurance mandates have been passed by an increasing number of states. These mandates require insurance companies to pony up sometimes tens of thousands of dollars year after year for treatments. In the past, many parents might not have been able to afford the princely sums a Marcus Center might charge for their behavioral "therapies." Now it all falls on a third party player if the parents gets a diagnosis for their child that falls under the umbrella of state approved "disorders" eligible for mandatory insurance payout. Both the parent and, in many cases, the institutions themselves, when "testing" for autism, have a financial interest in the result being a positive finding. "Diagnosed" early enough, a toddler could, over the next two decades, potentially bring a million dollars or more to an institution that also provides "therapy."
  Ami Klin, "Chief of Autism and Related Disorders" of the Marcus Center (and chief proponent of eye-tracking twaddle) seemed genuinely taken aback when I asked him at an AAC meeting a couple months back about such conflicts in interest at his own institution, as if the endless stream of intellectual mediocrities that have been paraded through the AAC as respected experts were somehow to be beyond moral reproach. No need to worry about such things at the Marcus Center, he assured me, as well as the rest of the audience, when I asked about what the wall of separation was between the diagnostic and theraputic sides of the Marcus Center.. After all, the testing was done by "scientists."
  Well, that's a relief.

  Or, maybe, Ami Klin just doesn't understand human behavior.


  Or, then again, maybe he does.