That everyday experience transformed the way Pollack thinks about disability and prompted him to write journalistic pieces that have touched the lives of thousands of other people caring for people with disabilities. They have also gained a following among policy makers and helped to influence legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act.

Pollack was a special correspondent for The New Republic in 2009 and 2010 and continues to write for the publication, though most of his current journalism now regularly appears in The Washington Post’s Wonkblog section. During his time as a special correspondent for The New Republic, he wrote for the magazine’s influential blog “The Treatment,” which was originated and run by Jonathan Cohn, senior editor and a leading reporter on health care reform. “Having Jonathan as my editor there was a highlight of my career,” Pollack says. He also credits Vox’s Ezra Klein, The New America Foundation’s Mark Schmitt, and Steve Anderson of healthinsurance.org, and others as providing the feedback he needed to bridge the worlds of academia and journalism.

“The editors I have worked with in my journalism taught me that there is real craftsmanship in the task—crafting an argument, structuring a story, disciplining the writing to meet deadlines, and word limits. There is also a craft to effectively and ethically interviewing people. I believe that aspect of my popular journalism has helped me in my research.

“I’ve learned to prepare well for an interview and gain people’s trust.” Many of his video interviews end up posted with his pieces as Pollack has used Skype as a tool in his reporting.

Amy Berman, senior program officer at The John A. Hartford Foundation, praises Harold Pollack for his interviewing skills. She joined him for two interviews that appeared in The Washington Post about her own experiences living with stage-IV breast cancer, as well as for an article in Politico Magazine last year.

“I talked about how palliative care has been unfairly treated in the policy sphere. I found Harold to be incredibly engaging and warm. He really gets to the heart of human issues,” says Berman, who writes about treatment topics.

“He is incredibly balanced in his journalism. He includes both ends of the political spectrum and accordingly creates an opportunity for a rich public dialogue. Having this in Politico is a tremendous opportunity to reach people.”

“What I admire about Harold is that he is eager to reach out to everyone he thinks can make a difference and he invests the time to use any tool he can find to get it out there,” said Joe Entwisle, senior health policy analyst for Health & Disability Advocates, headquartered in Chicago. Entwisle was paralyzed in a wrestling accident as a high school student. Entwisle himself frequently writes about disability from a variety of perspectives. The two men conducted a dialogue on disability issues that ran on The Washington Post’s site.

Pollack’s journalism often includes commentary on health care developments and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. His postings on living with disability or chronic conditions are close to home for him and also promote lively responses.

“I’ve heard from policy makers across the aisle who tell me that they have someone in their families with a disability. They’ve sometimes asked me for my opinion about how policies should be changed,” Pollack says.

David Cutler, a professor of applied economics at Harvard and a senior advisor to President Obama on health care policy said that Pollack’s work helped shape the Affordable Care Act.

“What Harold pointed out that was useful was the observation that people like Vincent and others who have disabilities or conditions such as HIV/AIDS need help from someone else to access the health care system. The beauty of what Harold has done through his writings is to point out that health care reform was not just an economic issue, but a social one as well. No one person is responsible for policy changes, but these points were incorporated into the law because of Harold’s work.

“He also made a point of stressing the importance of paying attention to predicable high cost medical expenses and suggesting ways to save money in those areas. He helped us understand that Vincent’s case is unique as are the cases of other people with disabilities, but that the process needs to work in a similar way and that social workers can help coordinate care to help keep costs down. Those observations were included in the legislation,” Cutler says.

Pollack maintains that his success in journalism is based on the credibility as a careful, serious scholar. Pollack, who has a BA in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton, developed his interest in social issues as a volunteer at a homeless shelter while working at an engineering job just out of college. At the shelter he learned about the struggles of vulnerable people and the shortcomings of the systems that were supposed to help them, he says.

The engineering laboratory where he worked was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Pollack began taking classes and earned a PhD in 1994. After Harvard, Pollack joined the first cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research program. Following a research appointment at Yale, he became a faculty member at the University of Michigan Department of Health Management and Policy, receiving tenure there in 2002. In 2003, he joined the SSA faculty.

In 2011 he received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that supports his empirical research and his book project. The project “Intellectual Disability and the American Medical Welfare State” studies the accomplishments and shortcomings of governmental and private agencies in dealing with three common genetic conditions associated with intellectual disability: Phenylketonuria (PKU), Down syndrome, and fragile X syndrome.

He is the author and co-author of numerous academic articles on disability policy, including “Learning to walk slow: America’s partial policy success in the arena of intellectual disability,” Journal of Policy History (2007), “The impact of managed care enrollment on emergency department use among children with special health care needs,” Medical Care (2007); and “Health policy and the community safety net for individuals with intellectual disability,” Developmental Disability Research Reviews (2011).

In general, our nation’s response to the needs of people with IDD is a quiet triumph of American social policy over the past two generations, Pollack said. Few people respond in a negative way to Perrone when they are out in public. Be it hard driven executives slowed by him as he maneuvers through airport security, or tough-looking teenagers who give him a friendly wave, on a personal level, the gentle, friendly faced Perrone is accepted almost everywhere he goes.

The changes in public attitude, which Pollack is writing about in his new book, were strongly influenced by people who shared their own stories of caring for loved ones living with IDD disabilities. After World War II , Nobel prize winning author Pearl Buck and television star Dale Evans wrote about their personal experiences with children with intellectual disabilities. They helped normalize the experience and hundreds of thousands of parents, largely middle class mothers, responded by advocating for the children.

“America has really opened its heart and its wallet to people living with intellectual disabilities. This is an overlooked triumph in many ways,” says Pollack. The support crosses class, racial and social lives as the problem of intellectual disability touches families regardless of their station in life.

One result of the support has been The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and other laws that have secured a place in society for people with disabilities. In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision ruled that the disabled are entitled to live in the least restrictive conditions possible, on a human scale, often within their own communities. “Olmstead may be the most important Supreme Court decision few Americans have ever heard of,” Pollack says.

Many people with IDD disabilities have lives that are much better than they would have been 30 or 40 years ago. Pollack interviewed one young woman, for instance, who has become a champion athlete, has a nice relationship with her boyfriend, and commutes to work at a local high school where she works in food service. “All this is possible because of the social services and legal protection we have established.”

“One thing I am able to point out through my journalism and my research is the tremendous variety of circumstances experienced by people with intellectual disabilities and their families,” he says.

“Disability policy is less driven by the usual partisan and culture-war divides that disfigures so much in American politics.” Many social and fiscal conservatives are interested in establishing incentives for people to save money to help family members with disabilities, to find ways that people living with disabilities can be more economically secure and self-supporting.

The work needing to be done on behalf of people living with disabilities and their families is evolving, he says. Illinois remains behind in providing key supports, particularly in providing appropriate home- and community-based supports for people who need them. More needs to be done as young adults with IDD “age out” of the support they receive as adolescents from local schools and transition to adult home- and community-based services. Illinois ranks in the bottom ten for key measures of accessibility and quality of such services across the states.

Improved health care has extended the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and related conditions. More than 800,000 individuals with IDD now live with caregivers who are over the age of 60. Most of these caregivers are parents, who have often cared for their adult children for decades in the family residence. Illinois and the nation must find more effective strategies to assist these families, he said.

Pollack is interviewing caregivers to see what their plans are as part of his research. Joining him is Rebecca Feinstein, PhD ’13, assistant professor at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Among the forty caregivers she has interviewed, she has found that “about a third of the families have no concrete plans at all as they can’t imagine someone else taking care of the children. Some have arranged for siblings to give care, such as was the case with Harold and his wife, and others have legal plans for guardianships and alternative housing arrangements,” she said.

Feinstein worked with Pollack as a graduate student and continues to work with him on his intellectual disabilities project. She also plans to continue her research by studying how families caring for children with disabilities manage health care services in Israel.

Pollack’s perspective as a caregiver as well as a researcher is a valuable asset, she said. “He is able to keep the work relevant because he understands the context that people live in. He has the big picture in mind, but also understands the everyday experience of people’s lives as he’s walked their walk,” she said.