G. Frink's

Autism in its acute forms is extraordinarily difficult to handle, even while requiring $50,000+ a year in therapeutic attention to grant each child who suffers it a chance at some measure autonomy.

Unless you live in South Carolina or one of the 15 other states which as of this writing to some degree mandate coverage, family health insurance you may have is unlikely to help pay for intensive therapies required to open the door to a better outcome.

Nor is the struggle over if you do live in one of the 16. Parents of autistic children, already exhausted by the demands of the illness, must fight for the benefits law requires.

Save where statute intervenes, insurance companies most often cooly submit that the treatment of autism is not a medical procedure and so not their concern.

Charleston Law School professor Lorri Unumb, who led the fight for change in South Carolina, explained CNN the experience she and her husband had in seeking coverage for care for their son Ryan:

It's not like you read your insurance policy and you can see a specific exclusion. We submitted bills, and we'd get denials back that said "experimental... denied," or "provided by a non-licensed provider... denied." Or sometimes the insurance companies would say "this therapy is educational in nature, not medical... denied."

Yet the diseases which compose the Autism Spectrum Disorders are complex and as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention make clear, they require medical diagnosis or something indistinguishable from it to classify well and so treat appropriately and effectively. The CDC and like authorities also agree that ASDs are the result of genetic, environmental and/or other physiological insults, all undeniably within the realm of medical concerns.

ASDs in most cases require both early intervention and a combination of therapies which are as medical as the rehabilitative therapy more American soldiers should receive when they return home from Iraq. Both cases illustrate how far down the path of commonplace neglect this nation has strayed in public health policy, so that conscience requires Lorri Unumb and others like her to join in years-long battle for legislation like Ryan's Law.

Calling ASD treatments "educational benefits" is a especially false logic. The fact that treatment often occurs at school attests to the age of those treated and speaks directly to the overarching value of keeping those children as much with mainstream life experiences as possible during their 20 to 40 hours a week of therapy.

They must be with other children, lest we risk eventually setting them apart as pariahs and so fail in our fundamental moral obligation to care well for those least able to defend themselves.

That good purpose of helping children live the lives of children by providing treatment at school was not spontaneously embraced by school systems across the land as a natural educational activity. It is fostered by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which in return helps fund the programs.

Susan Pisano of America's Health Insurance Plans, a Washington-based association that represents health insurers, made the place-is-classification argument quite gracefully in an interview with CNN:

I think that it's perfectly understandable that if you are diagnosed with a condition, or a family member is diagnosed with a condition, you want to get services. Traditionally those services have been provided through early intervention programs for children in the 0-3 age group, and by schools for children who are older.

Yet the place of treatment cannot transform the treatments into the equivalents of language arts or math classes, any more than swallowing prescribed medication at school makes that an academic activity. School sponsorship does not transform the treatment either, any more than psychiatric counseling delivered at school becomes coursework by virtue of the building in which it occurs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics regards ASDs as so important an aspect of its members' practices that it has published a technical paper on the subject. That paper begins:

Autism and its milder variants are not rare. Most pediatricians will have the opportunity to provide a medical home for a child with autism.

What drives health insurance companies to their overstrained logic is clear in work like that of Michael Ganz, an assistant professor of Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard School of Public Health. His studies conclude that $70,000 or more a year is required to properly treat an ASD child with any but the least acute symptoms.

American Health insurance companies typically want none of that cost, for they are by and large in the business of making money, and in most cases of avoiding the burden of those in most need of help.

Children are not spreadsheet ciphers and our obligation to come to their defense is inescapable.

Conscience in this case requires the remedy of law.