Reply to Cost of IEE exceeds 'reasonable & customary'

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Reply to "Cost of IEE exceeds 'reasonable & customary'"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What does the county think is reasonable & customary and what does he charge? I'm just curious--I have a hunch that what the county wants to pay is an amount much lower than any decent practictioner charges. [/quote]

The cap set by the county is $900 for an education evaluation, $1,200 for a psychological evaluation and $400 for a speech/language evaluation.  The Stixrud range for neuro-psychological testing is $2,960-$4,035.  [/quote]

All these amounts are very low, but the speech/language is laughable.   Several years ago ours was $1100; I imagine it's even more now.

Of course, the amounts for psych and ed are laughable too, but at least if you add them together you get $2100.   It's interesting that there is no breakout of cost for psych vs. neuropsych.  IME, neuropsych assessments cost more than assessments by those who are merely "psychologists".  That's not surprising because neuropsychologists have more training that psychologists and thus can charge more.  (I've just my own avery small anecdotal sample.)  My insurance company doesn't distinguish between psych and neuropsych generally and doesn't really cover the latter.  It might be worth calling around and getting prices/test lists for some "educational psychologists" for comparison with what Stixrud is doing.  Maybe you can point to the difference in testing in order to support Stixrud's cost.

We chose to use Stixrud because they did some objective, normed, standardized non-language-based testing for attention and executive functioning.  In our situation we were concerned about making the differential diagnosis between auditory processing, language-based learning disability and ADHD.  All of these have overlapping symptoms.  The main way the school or educational psychologist "diagnoses" ADHD is through checklists filled out by the teacher and parent.  These checklists identify problem behaviors but don't really identify the differential underlying causes.  We already knew that our child had a language disorder, so we really needed the objective testing piece for ADD/executive dysfunction.  I share this because it's an example of why a particular case is "unusually complicated" and thus may justify a higher cost for testing.

Unfortunately, we paid privately, so I don't have personal experience with the process. [/quote]

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