In France, a category called orphan diseases was created to group together, with the same lobbying capacity, diseases that were not sufficiently represented to come under scrutiny.
Autism has something of a special status, as if it were something more tragic or dramatic than other diseases. I don't think that's the case. I have spent my life conducting research on autism and fighting for the rights of autistic people. However, I don't think they should be treated any differently than other human beings.
In Quebec—I'm not familiar with the legislation of other provinces—there is an imbalance between the number of services people are automatically entitled to when diagnosed with autism, and the number of services people are entitled to when living with conditions that, in some cases, may be far more debilitating than autism.
For instance, there is Tourette's syndrome, which I bring up for personal reasons. People with Tourette's can be doing very well, but they can also be doing very poorly, much worse than autistic people who are doing well. The same is true of intellectual disability and post-surgery epileptic patients, or those suffering from various neurological syndromes.
I would like to repeat my initial suggestion. If we were to provide services based on the level of disability, sector by sector, and not based on the diagnosis, we would be less likely to create orphan categories.