I signed up for one of those Organize for America slots for Health Care Reform. Yes, I have better things to do with my time, so I tried to call the office to speak to someone. Organize for America has my congressman's number wrong.
Organizing for America
Rachel --
Thank you for signing up to drop by Rep. Frank Wolf's local office in Herndon. We've received early reports of thousands of folks stopping by local offices, sharing their personal health care stories, and getting a welcome reception.
Please note that this is not an official scheduled meeting with your representative or your representative's staff. Rather, you will be part of a steady stream of supporters dropping by all day. So please stop in on the day you signed up for, drop off materials, share the reasons you support reform -- and most importantly, thank those representatives who are working hard for reform.
Rep. Frank Wolf
Herndon Office
13873 Park Center Road, Suite 130
Herndon, VA 20171 (Map)
Phone: (703) 790-5800
Please call ahead to let them know you will be visiting the office.
The prefix is turned around - it's 709. So when I called, I wound up speaking to some poor businessman, who by his own estimation, has taken thousands of phone calls for Congressman Wolf's office related to this e-mail. I let both the Herndon and DC offices of the Rep. Wolf know the error, as I have had no luck tracking down a phone number for Organize for America. Some poor man who is trying to get his work done is getting his day interrupted by Organize for America callers.
Oh, and I am for health care reform (my autism experience has proven to me the need for change), though I am trying to make it through this document for HB3200 to see if I can support everything its about. I am through blindly supporting things along party lines (but that is another post for another day.) I wonder if they have an abridged version, without the congressional jargon and legalese.
3 comments:
What needs to be changed because of autism? How do you believe that healthcare reform will address these needs? What should and should not be covered? Will these changes actually benefit the ASD individual, or the parents of ASD individuals?
Who will bear the cost of these expenses (both financially and in terms of reallocation of services because both of these will happen)?
Why read the House Bill when there is no Senate Bill and once there is a Senate Bill, the HB and SB will need to be consolidated which probably won’t even remotely look like the current HB?
I think my insurance experience with trying to get Jimmy speech early on really soured me on the industry. Currently, my brother-in-law has four tumors in his head and one in his spine and Aetna is refusing the full body MRI his doctor is ordering to find other potential tumors. He had one removed from his body several years ago in a region unrelated to the head/spine.
I know there has been an organized effort to get language in any health reform bill to address ASD coverage. It's a medical diagnosis, yet the therapies the doctor orders are in no way covered. I think there is enough of a body of evidence behind ABA, AVB, and even the Floortime approach in building a variety of lifetime skills that they should be cover to the benefit of both patient and family.
Without treatment, you are only insuring that these kids will become adults intensive needs that can't be met by families alone. The cost to the state will be enormous. I would rather be able to use what I pay for now (medical insurance) to treat Jimmy and get him to be the best Jimmy he can, in the hopes that he can be a productive adult.
You made a good point about the bill. I actually read the synopsis of it from the Congressional Research Service instead to get the important parts.
“It's a medical diagnosis”
Then it is the only medical diagnosis defined by the DSM. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease are not in the DSM. The very definition of ASD is in the DSM.
Also there are objective tests for medical disorders (blood sugars, blood pressure. Biopsies) that are used to make a medical diagnosis. There is no such objective medical test for ASD.
“I think there is enough of a body of evidence behind ABA, AVB, and even the Floortime approach…”
How is the evidence meaningful to forecast future outcomes, what was the evidence based on, and how was the evidence collected?
Any evidence that has been collected for the therapies you listed will have a multitude of inherent problems and biases. Any study that has “long term” data (more then 10 years) will be primarily based on diagnosis from the DSM-III. That autism is not the same as today’s autism. The data collected for these long term studies are also mostly a collection of case studies, subject to cherry picking and omission of data from the study designers. There is no objective way to measure or record the effectiveness of any of the listed therapies, so from a scientific or legal standpoint there is no evidence to support it.
Also, the fact that anyone that receives these services is not guaranteed to benefit from them in the long run. Individuals with a college degree are expected to make more money over the course of their lifetime then those that do not have them, but there is no guarantee to that.
Hard to quantify what ASD is and hard to qualify any evidence for services. Given these two facts, the current discussions will not go away easily anytime soon.
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