Autism treatment should be covered by medicare as part of a national strategy for the disorder, Canadian actor and director Eugene Levy said Wednesday.

As a spokesman for a national autism strategy, Levy joined Senator Jim Munson and parents of children with autism in calling on the federal government to publicly commit to changing the Canada Health Act to include effective, science-based treatment for autism for all Canadians, regardless of age or where they live.

"Families with autistic kids have the same rights as everybody else," Levy told CBC Newsworld. "Treatment has to be covered the way it's covered for any other debilitating disease."

About one in every 94 boys is being diagnosed with the neurological disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The disorder affects aptitude for communication and personal interaction.

While the 2007 U.S. budget includes more than $120 million to conduct research into autism and offer early screening programs and treatment, Canadian families are losing their homes and life savings as they try to provide therapy privately to their autistic children, said Levy, whose cousin's son has the disorder.

"It takes specialists to give these kids therapy," said Levy. He is known for his sketches in the comedy series SCTV and his roles in the films American Pie and A Mighty Wind.

The group's national strategy would also include:

• Funding for the creation of academic chairs and departments of applied behaviour analysis, or ABA, at Canadian universities, as in the U.S.
• Establishing federal/provincial systems to license, register and certify professional ABA experts.
• Recognize certified ABA professionals as health-care professionals.
• Provide easily accessible information about autism to family physicians, pediatricians and all other Canadians to raise awareness and promote earlier diagnosis.

Financial, moral reasons to act

In ABA, which costs between $30,000 and $80,000 a year per patient, therapists lead children through multiple repetitions of tasks until the tasks are learned. In 2004, the Supreme Court refused to order the B.C. government to fund ABA, saying the province had the right to set its own priorities for health-care funding.

Not providing ABA treatment is more expensive because it involves respite care, group homes and institutionalization, said Munson, who referred to a Harvard University study that put the annual cost of autism to Canada's economy at $3.5 billion.

Children who get treatment can show remarkable improvements that allow them to contribute to society, but the costs saved are harder to measure, Munson said.

In November, the federal government announced a research chair to look at treatments and interventions for autism, a surveillance program, a new Health Canada website on autism, and a stakeholder symposium that the group said has been cancelled or not rescheduled.

"Will our MPs summon the necessary courage and political will to overcome their political impotence by overruling the entrenched health-care technocrats and do the morally right thing by our children?" asked Norrah Whitney, founding director of Families for Early Autism Treatment of Ontario.