Wampum

Not Counting

When faced with the challenges of raising a neurologically atypical child, one gets used to the small slights by school system personnel, social services workers, the health care system, merchants and other commercial enterprise employees, parents of neurologically typical kids, and the public at large. The origin of most of those slights is ignorance, not malice. Nonetheless, it is easy to get the idea that autistic or other neurologically atypical kids and their families just do not count. It is distressing to learn that it is now government policy for us not to count.

Chris Mooney, writing at The American Prospect, has done an admirable job of covering the policy making process with regard to mercury emissions.

In his first piece on the subject, Mooney demonstrated that the administration has systemically skewed the science in an effort to minimize the health risks of mercury emissions from power plants. Those risks are most acute in pregnant women for whom mercury exposure risks having neurologically damaged children.

In today’s installment, Mooney looks at how the administration rigged the cost/benefit analysis of various mercury emissions policies to support their preferred option. This point caught my attention:

Mercury is a toxic substance, emitted from power plants (among other sources), which contaminates fish and poses the strongest dangers to pregnant mothers and their unborn children. Clearly, there are going to be non-negligible economic benefits to be reaped from protecting children from the kinds of neurological and developmental problems that can result from being exposed to mercury in utero. In deciding how to regulate mercury, you probably wouldn't want to downplay such considerations, much less leave them out of your regulatory calculus….

And maybe most stunningly, the GAO added that the EPA had failed to "quantify the human health benefits of decreased exposure to mercury, such as reduced incidence of developmental delays, learning disabilities, and neurological disorders."

When doing a cost/benefit analysis of mercury emissions policy, the administration did not count preventing neurological disorders such as autism as a benefit.

My son’s autism is, inevitably, one of the central organizing facts of his life, my life, and my entire family’s life. Avoiding that neurological disorder would certainly have been a benefit to him and to us. Preventing other families from having to organize their lives around a child’s neurological disorder really ought to count for something. I realize that, in certain circles, it will always count for less than power company profits. Nonetheless, for our government to tell us that it counts for absolutely nothing is pretty hard to take with any degree of equanimity.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at March 14, 2005 12:18 PM | TrackBack