Keeping Emergencies From Becoming Tragedies

Pay Now Or Pay Later: Some 2,000 people attended a rally yesterday in O’Fallon, Mo., supporting legislation requiring insurance companies to cover therapy for children with autism, a lawmaking leap already taken in 14 states. Last legislative session, a bill mandating coverage passed in the Missouri Senate but failed to come up for a vote in the House. (Among proponents this time are state lawmakers whose own children have the disorder.) Not having enough on its plate right now in American history, the insurance industry opposes the mandate, arguing that everyone’s premiums will rise about 3 percent. Such legislation has also been bandied about in the healthcare reform debate.

Photo courtesy of Kopper (flickr.com)

Getting people to agree to open their wallets wider in a crappy economy is about as easy as getting them to shave their heads with a cheese grater, but surely the predictions of autism’s coming financial burden — a burden that will fall, financially or otherwise, on all of us — is enough to warrant more than blowing off these insurance proposals with the same tired reflex responses about rising costs.

Get With the Programs: A lost boy with autism in the Wilmington, Del., area has been found and returned home after police employed “A Child Is Missing” to find the 13-year-old. The Child program uses an automated phone service to notify area residents. The boy, whose foster parents had reported that he walked away from their home and disappeared after 8 p.m. on Saturday, was spotted by a neighbor, who called 911. More, including efforts to mandate the program, is here.

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A few years back I was talking to the mom of a big autistic teen who sometimes hit her. Balancing her love for her son and her concern for her own safety, she asked the local cops, hypothetically, what they’d do with her autistic son if she called them. “Cuff him and throw him in Central Holding,” they replied. “I’d rather get hit,” she confided to me later.

Well, in Itasca, Ill., police are using a program by which they learn about a local child’s autism — including the best way to approach these children — without scaring them — through a department program that allows families to share information on medical problems and disabilities. (Under this program, for instance, instead of wasting time interviewing a frantic mother, police looked at a computer screen for key info, and found a 6-year lost autistic girl playing on railroad tracks. Railroad tracks. Talk about the importance of not wasting time.) Similar services are being set up throughout Illinois under a new “premise alert program” that allows families to contact their local police or fire department and submit information about someone who may need special attention in an emergency due to autism, Alzheimer’s, deafness, or other conditions. The program, signed into law late last month, mandates that if a 911 call center has the proper technology, it must accept information on people with disabilities and share that information with police, firefighters and paramedics. Put your hands together for the Itasca PD — and it probably doesn’t hurt that their deputy chief is on the board of the Autism Society of Illinois and reports having seen situations — such as when an autistic 16-year-old in Chicago simply walked away from a police interview earlier this year and received a gash on his head from a cop’s baton — where such information could prevent an emergency from turning into a tragedy.

As of October 2008, 85 of Illinois’ 102 counties had enhanced 911 service but just a few local agencies have offered the alert program. Pennsylvania also offers the service widely, and some some counties and cities have set up individual programs.

Shame on anywhere that’s dragging its feet on these programs. They’re common sense and easy to install given today’s emergency-response technology. I have no doubt they’ll be everywhere someday, but let’s make sure that one simple and tragic condition doesn’t have to be met first.

More is here, and here, and here.