Well, I have to sit this one out. I'm not American, plus I am on shore leave. Good luck with this, PWP in the U.S.A. This is a test. You have been put in your place. Again. Somewhere between old age and alcoholism. Every PD org. must go public to change this law, and pay close attention to the reaction, or lack thereof.

Amgen proved it first in the GDNF fiasco - they told members of Congress and their own P.R. machine that they were unplugging the volunteers, before they told the volunteers. And they not only got away with it, they prospered. They refused to even have PWP involved; cut off communication with Nick Nelson, who was writing a book about it. They demonstrated that PWP can be bulldozed, despite many on this site and elsewhere who fought it tooth and nail for years.

Politically ignore cancer or AIDS at your peril; ignoring Parkies is a piece of cake.

Perhaps no one agrees with Anuket's approach, but on a number of occasions she has raised interesting questions about the fluffing of evidence in Parkinson's research, and each time she invites the researchers to show where she is wrong. They delete her comments, or simply go silent, or send her a condescending letter.
The group in Amsterdam who are paying Amgen for the privilege of pushing GDNF research further finally replied to my letters - and they seem quite open now - but one group in the U.S.A. working on GDNF did not reply at all, as usual.

These are just examples: your superiors do not fear any consequences if they ignore you. The government can, by deliberate intention or by ignorance and neglect, exclude you from the new provisions that apply to others, and they do not think that you have any strength left to reply. Or maybe they just don't think about you at all. And that is not a criticism of the U.S.A.; here in Canada the Parkie associations would not even dream of saying anything about anything to anyone for any reason at any time, and my own group is hard to deal with now, because they are in full-scale revolt, countered by an instinct that leads them to stay "underground", meaning simply, keep a low profile and avoid any mention of Parkinson's; take a defensive position, take care of each other as best we can, and close the door on the Parkinson's circus.

You've got to win this one. And then find out how and why it happened, and who discovered it, and who had the courage to inform the Parkies. With luck, it will turn out to be a typographical error in a 2,000 page contract, and it gets corrected right away. But if excluding neurology is deliberate, then the whole issue is only about who they think we are, compared to who they think they are.
Once again, time and energy and resources are required to fend off the assaults. Time and energy and resources that should go into winning a war against the disease. Like we won the war against polio. Like we blew smallpox off the face of the planet. Nobody in Congress said, "well, you know. let's exclude the people with polio"; or "smallpox - that's just really old people who will be dead before the next election, right?" If there actually was a war against Parkinson's, Congress would not so easily put you way, way, way down below the Cash for Clunkers program.