By Richard Wexler, Special for CalMatters<\/p>\n
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n Guest Commentary written by<\/p>\n California\u2019s private foster care agencies are running back to Sacramento, demanding another taxpayer bailout to cover rising insurance costs. Cal Matters reported recently<\/a> that the state\u2019s foster family agencies want another $30 million, on top of the $31.5 million they got last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the many reasons these agencies should not get a bailout \u2014 or any other help \u2014 can be found in the very reason they\u2019re in trouble: Insurance costs are rising because so many children who were abused on their watch finally are able to get compensation<\/a>. That fact alone should be enough to call into question foster family agency claims about the wonders they supposedly perform and the catastrophe that supposedly would befall children if they went out of business.<\/p>\n Other reasons to ignore the fearmongering can be found in the CalMatters story: More than 24 of these agencies have already closed. All the horrors the story describes are hypothetical. There is not a single case where they all came to pass. The worst example in the story involved a pair of foster parents who were inconvenienced.<\/p>\n That should be no surprise. The demands for another bailout, and other remedies that would be even worse, are based on the idea that if foster family agencies disappeared there would be a sort of insurance-induced rapture: all their employees, all their buildings and all the foster parents they license suddenly would vanish.<\/p>\n In reality, as the story documents, governments are perfectly capable of hiring the same employees and licensing the same foster parents. They already do it for 86% of California\u2019s foster children. Do they do the job better than the foster family agencies? Probably not. But there\u2019s no evidence they do any worse.<\/p>\n Consider findings on the rare occasions other news organizations and grand juries dug deeper:In 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported<\/a> the foster family agency system \u201chas become more expensive and more dangerous than the government-run homes it has largely replaced.\u201d In 2016, an Orange County grand jury<\/a> found that foster family agency homes were no better than county-run homes. They were just more expensive.<\/p>\n And last month, a foster family agency agreed to pay $11.25 million<\/a> to six siblings from a single family, to compensate them for horrific abuse they endured in a home in Riverside County the agency oversaw.<\/p>\n Surely, at a minimum, foster family agencies should have to prove they have cleaned up their acts before California taxpayers divert more funds that could be used to actually serve vulnerable children and families.<\/p>\n If these agencies get their way, they\u2019ll likely get away with similar negligence in the future, because the agencies want more than another bailout. What some are calling \u201creforms\u201d are actually proposals to give foster family agencies near-total immunity from lawsuits by their alleged victims.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s no wonder the Children\u2019s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law wrote<\/a> that these so-called reforms would have inflicted \u201cunprecedented conditions on the ability of foster children to obtain compensation.\u201d The institute argued that children who happened to be overseen by foster family agencies would be denied the right to seek the same compensation<\/a> afforded to every other abused child or adult.<\/p>\n What makes this so tragic is that what these agencies call a crisis actually is an opportunity. It\u2019s a chance to reconsider the extent to which a knee-jerk, take-the-child-and-run response has harmed children it was intended to help.<\/p>\n Most children torn from their families are nothing like the stereotypes that come to mind when we hear the words \u201cchild abuse.\u201d In 2024, in 85% of cases in which California children were forced into foster care, there wasn\u2019t an accusation of physical or sexual abuse<\/a>. In 87%, there was not so much as an accusation of drug abuse.<\/p>\n Overwhelmingly, children were taken due to \u201cneglect,\u201d which often means the family is poor.<\/p>\n That means the so-called insurance crisis can be a chance to rethink decades of stale assumptions. Each time a family foster agency closes, counties should take a second look at each child and ask: Does this child really need to be in foster care at all?<\/p>\n Foster family agencies are not \u201ccritical infrastructure;\u201d they are barriers to making all of California\u2019s vulnerable children safer. California\u2019s children and taxpayers would be better off without them.<\/p>\n This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Richard Wexler, Special for CalMatters This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. 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