CLOates
16 May 2008
Norman, OK, USA
Please Help!
If you want to urge Speaker of the Oklahoma House Chris Benge to bring to a vote Nick's Law to keep Oklahoma insurance companies from excluding autism treatments in their policies, please, please, please contact him by phone, fax, and e-mail at the following numbers/addresses TODAY:
Speaker Benge's office phone: (405) 557-7340
Speaker Benge's fax number: (405) 557-7494
Speaker Benge's e-mail addr: chrisbenge@okhouse.gov
Only three days remain during which bills can be scheduled for voting this session. A lot of autistic kids are going to go without treatment and/or bankrupt their parents if we do not all share the cost. It's a pay-me-now/pay-me-much-more-later situation, since the treatments tp mitigate the symptoms of this problem are effective only when the children are quite young. They can't wait.
More information on Nick's Law can be obtained at http://nickslawok.blogspot.com/ .
Below is a plea my friend and former student Chasity Lynch sent to Speaker Benge.
* CAUTION *
This is disturbing reading material. It's put here in the hope it will motivate you act.
Prof. Oates
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Speaker Benge,
I am writing you to urge you to bring Nick's Law up before then end of session. I know and understand you have been bombarded with these types of emails but I am a mother of a son who has autism. I was sharing with a dear friend my thoughts about this and I have come to the conclusion you need to hear them... Imagine that you had to deal with this, put yourself in my shoes, and my husband's shoes. He serves in the United States Air Force because he loves his country but more importantly because at this point with our son's medical care he HAS TO. Here is a VERY SMALL PORTION of what we deal with:
" ... If for one single day he [Benge] could try to figure out what his 3 year old was needing by complete and utter mind reading because his son couldn't talk, if for one day he could try to feed his 3 year old dinner without having it all spit out and gagged back up because the child has had a sensory adversion to whatever it was that was put into his mouth, if for one day he could see his child bang his head against the wall because things just wont slow down, if for one day he could worry about his child having a seizure and having to sit and watch the terror in your child's face as they lie and wait for it to pass.... If for only one day they could be BLESSED---and I truly mean blessed because he is my angel, with a child like Gabe, they would see that they are doing a disservice to these children and these already stress ridden families. Worrying about weather or not you are going to have to take care of your child for the rest of his/her life, will they talk, will they be able to out grow some of this stuff, with they be able to go to regular school... They should then not have to worry about HOW THE HECK ARE WE GOING TO GET HIM/HER HELP WITHOUT GOING BANKRUPT... "
Is it really worth sitting on? Do you not believe these children should have the same chance at life as everyone else. It's proven that therapy and other interventions help these children sooner. We could reduce the amount of children in our developmentally delayed programs opening spots up for more children that need help.
PLEASE--For the love of God, PLEASE bring this up. I don't see how you can SLAP us in the face like this and go to sleep at night resting well. You NEED to get this brought up so that this issue can be discussed. MY SON IS WORTH IT, and heaven forbid you ever, EVER have to deal with a child like mine.
Respectfully,
CHASITY LYNCH
MOTHER OF GABRIEL LYNCH who HAS AUTISM ("AWE"-TISM)
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Comment:
Chasity has said it better than I ever could, but just for the record here's my nastygram to Oklahoma Speaker of the House Benge. The first three paragraphs are Autism Speaks' boilerplate, but the rest, written with a curare-covered keyboard, are mine. --CLO
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Representative Chris Benge
I am writing to urge that you bring Nick's Law, the autism insurance reform, up for an immediate vote in the Oklahoma House.
Nick's Law seeks to end the discrimination in insurance coverage against children with autism and their families by requiring insurance companies to cover essential services for individuals with autism. Today, 1 in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined. When children with autism receive appropriate services they can make great gains and improve significantly. This bill is a common-sense and fiscally responsible way of helping families to access health care services that they are currently excluded from receiving due to their autism diagnosis.
I urge you to help end this blatant discrimination by the insurance companies by calling for an immediate vote on Nick's Law. Each day we delay, another child with autism is denied the opportunity for the best possible life.
Would you set up a system to exclude, say, strokes because they're expensive to treat? Autism, like other diseases and syndromes should be a shared cost. If not now, then when? You should be ashamed.
Just to give you an idea of what I think of you and your cohorts, below is an excerpt from my letter to a friend of mine who is the mother of an autistic child.
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It's amazing how bureaucracy, idiocy, and inertia can conspire to keep kids (and often adults too) from getting the accommodations they need. My favorites, though, are the Oklahoma legislators/hypocrites who go to church every Sunday and profess faith in the Great Healer and then go to the legislature on Monday and protect the insurance companies from having to cover autism, leaving folks, even though they have insurance (what few of those there still are in Oklahoma), to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the help that's available. That should be a cost we all share. It would surely up the insurance rates--by what, a dollar a year each? There's a pretty narrow window of opportunity for the help to do the kids any good. (Young brains have great plasticity, older ones do not.) Would that our esteemed legislators cared as much for the BORN as they (correctly, I think) seem to for the unborn.
Sincerely,
Charles L. Oates
Norman, OK
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