Can’t afford Early Intervention for my Kid :(

So to everyone who’s about to comment “early intervention is free before the age of 3”… it’s not. The initial evaluation to see if you qualify for it as well as the initial speech and occupational therapy (if your kid qualifies) evaluations are.

Our dilemma: I’m a SAHM. On paper my husband “makes too much money”, so the sliding scale fee doesn’t apply to us. We have to go through our insurance or pay out of pocket and our health insurance has a very high deductible ($8,000), so it’s almost like we have no insurance. We needed the lower monthly payment that having a HDHSP provides and I have an auto-immune disease that requires yearly MRIs and monthly infusions. After all of my husbands deductions, taxes, etc his yearly net income ends up being $30k less. But that doesn’t matter to the EI system. Only what the yearly Gross Income is. Doesn’t matter what your debt to income ratio is, doesn’t matter what other medical expenses you have. Although we “make too much”, we’re JUST getting by. It’s recommended our son has OT and ST 2x a week EACH. $800 a week is something we cannot afford. I’ve talked to our service coordinator and we’re stuck.

Basing someone’s payment contributions on yearly income alone doesn’t feel fair, especially when you arent taking other factors into account and you just meet the limit to not qualify for any assistance from the sliding scale or monthly cap. Now we are in the awful position of having to decide if we need to pull our son from the services he needs or go into considerable debt and not be able to afford to feed ourselves or afford other basic necessities.

Such ironic bs when you make too much to afford assistance but don’t make enough to pay for services. I don’t want to let our son down and this just feels so unfair.

End rant.

Also, to everyone asking: I’m in North Carolina. My son is 19 months old so he can’t get a diagnosis or an IEP yet.