I completely agree with you that the award exceeds what the care would cost. My wife is a college prof, researcher, and works with autistic children. I have family and close friends with autistic children, and you are spot on, that's way more than it would really cost. I also agree that the excess should go to research too. I'm a conservative, yet despite your perception I know that plenty of excellent research comes from state universities like the one my wife is employed by. This is putting the research in the hands of the gov't, and I'm fine with that. However, I would not trust congress with spending that money on research. Ideally I'd like to see it go directly to a good medical research school somewhere. So don't categorize all conservatives under one issue, it's foolish. You can believe in smaller government yet believe in the importance of the government's role in education (and thus research). Not all conservatives are the same, just like not all liberals are the same.

If you are able to, set the "return-path" to bounces@yourdomain.com. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can comment on this, but I think SPF is checked with the domain found in return-path? The side affect is if for some reason mail to your gmail account bounces, your friend will not get the bounce, but it will be sent to bounces@yourdomain.com instead. Don't set it to the same address you are forwarding, or bounces will end up in a loop. I successfully solved this very same problem by doing this recently. So far it's working, and in my application I was forwarding mail for lots of people with accounts on yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc. There were a few more steps I had to take with getting yahoo and hotmail to accept the forwarded mail, but this alone solved trouble with SPF's. Note that I also setup an SPF for my domain, allowing my MTA server's IP.