That is the common response, and it is correct if you ignore a lot of factors.

The simplest of which: Brand power.

"Cough medicine, from the company that Cured the Common Cold"
"Because of us, you are safe from AIDS. So why not buy our stiffy pills and go bang a hooker?"
"Trouble sleeping? We had the same problem (back before we Cured The Common Cold), so try our sleeping pills"

I am generally loathe to defend insurance companies and I am thrilled that the iPad (even though I generally hate Apple) is helping this child.

However, I am the father of a special needs child. You have to understand not just that companies charge a massive premium for items for children like this, but that parents want so badly to help their children they will literally do nearly anything, including really whacked out shit. They are not bad people, just desperate. This includes wacko blood therapies and all other kinds of bizarre stuff. It's not unreasonable for insurance, be it government or private, to demand actual studies showing this stuff helps in enough cases to recommend it. It is medical treatment and needs to meet the same standards as any other medical treatment, it needs to be safe and effective (though it's most likely safe, it still should be proven).

All in all, the cost of an iPad is a pittance compared to what you pay out of pocket for children with special needs. It would be nice if it was covered, but I for one, who even has a self interest in this subject, am just fine with doing due diligence on this one before we declare it "treatment". Not really because it would cost insurance companies money needlessly, but mostly because I hate to see parents miss out on opportunities for effective treatment for their children in favor of what amounts to quackery (in many cases).

I can say anyone who has had kids in the autism spectrum is not in the least surprised by this, though, a lot of us have found that certain things help certain types of children do far better in learning to communicate, pets and computers are two big success stories for a lot of us.

Btw, I'm buzzed, pardon any incoherence, and if I was a jerk, I didn't mean to be.

Are you seriously basing everything you know about patent law and medical research on an episode of House?

Actually, he might be ignorant, but I'm guessing that show's writers were not. This is happening today. 20 year old medications are having their propellant changed from CFC (bad for the environment) to HFA and being granted new patents. A 7 dollar inhaler for asthma now costs over 250 dollars and the old, CFC version if off the market. Also, old drugs that are now generic are being re-formulated with just the left hand or right hand molecules of the active ingredient and being granted new patents. Functionally these drugs are the same (or maybe less effective) than their old versions. Pharmacies can't sub in a generic automatically (afaik) in these cases so many folks pay 100s when they could get by with 5-10 bucks per refill.

Also, another example, Propecia is a new dosage, 1mg instead of the old 5mg generic version of the drug. The new use was off label so they were simply able to do a new study with the lower dosage with the off label usage, prove it was effective for the off label usage (remember, not only doctors knew this, the original patent holders promoted prescribing it for this same off label usage) and now they have a new patent and charge 100s instead of 15 bucks.

I'm not taking sides here, but many folks genuinely believe that entertainers cannot really have anything profound to say via their entertainment (George Carlin, Shakespeare, the physicists and mathematicians who write Futurama, and a million others aside). This kind of reaction is to be expected.

A TV show isn't immediately of less merit in a discussion of facts. A FICTIONAL TV show is of less merit in a discussion of facts.

Simple...they aren't real. The onus on the writing for a fictional program is to produce drama and interesting characters, not to teach facts. That's why a fictional TV show is not a good basis for a factual argument.

True. But most people would look for more factual, informative sources of that information before presenting it as facts.