Comments on:

By: Rita Casey

Rita Casey — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:22:48 +0000

Let me speak to a couple of the issues that Mr. Wallin raises – this isn’t the forum to address all of them. First, to money. No one has said that the cost of intervention with this families is a life-time $3300 per year cost per child. And will “merely 2000″ children be assisted? No, that’s not truly the case. When a child is helped, the parents will be helped, and if the parents, many of whom are undereducated with respect to ordinary child care, become better parents as a result, additional children born to the family will also be assisted. When these assisted children are grown, they will be better parents, too, because they will parent their children as they themselves were raised.
These interventions are not designed to thwart or replace the authority of the home. Rather, they help provide homes with proper authority: good discipline and good child-rearing practices, sensitive to the age of the child. One of your alternate proposals, to depend on the volunteer efforts of caring people in the community, is a great idea, but it hasn’t worked recently, has it? Most of us don’t know whether a parent needs assistance, encouragement, or guidance in raising his or her child. What I do know, is that children, if they drop out of school, if they are disciplined so poorly that they lack enough control to learn, if their health is poor, if they are abused or neglected, then our community, our state, will pay eventually, and a lot more than $3300 per child.
And as to Mr. Wallin’s second alternative, taking in these children, presumes removal of parental rights, a far more drastic step than offering state-funded assistance for a short period of time. Removing a child is more than thwarting the authority of the home, it is destroying and replacing the home.

By: Norm Cohen, NOCIRC of Michigan

Norm Cohen, NOCIRC of Michigan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:05:32 +0000

These are absolutely essential programs for child abuse prevention, health promotion, and family outreach. Why then, is the State still spending $2.6 million a year paying for unnecessary, non-therapeutic newborn circumcisions?

Across our nation, 16 states have eliminated Medicaid coverage for circumcisions in response to their own budget crises: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Since 1996, infant circumcision has not been a publicly insured service throughout Canada.

The decision to drop coverage has always been based on the lack of valid medical indications for the procedure. Routine circumcision is not recommended by any national medical health organization in the world. The United States Congress appropriates Medicaid funds to states only for medically necessary services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has defined circumcision performed at parental request as medically unnecessary.

The national circumcision rate has now dropped to 55%. Circumcision is the only surgery performed on children without a diagnosis, and it is the most common one performed on them. Circumcision performed at parental request is something other than medicine, and it cannot stand up to objective budget scrutiny because it cannot meet Medicaid’s criteria of “medically necessary.”

The savings will enable Medicaid to provide $2.6 million more every year in better healthcare, outreach, and prevention services for Michigan’s children.

By: David Wallin

David Wallin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:27:17 +0000

I question this kind of expense for “intravention” in parents homes for merely 2000 children. That is $3300/child state expense before they are even off the ground. With that kind of state support if these numbers are continued, the cost per birth of such children by the time they are 60 would be $198,000 /child.

Even if it works well, where is the end to the cost. This work used to be done by compassionate individuals in communities who cared for one another AT NO EXPENSE AT ALL.

I am concerned also. But money does not grow on trees, and I still believe right, wrong, or indifferent that such money breeds more dependency and that the State of Michigan is not capable of taking care of dependent families to this extent. We will go broke.

Maybe I am the idiot here. But PhD studies that create new “Job opportunities for Master Degrees in Social Work applicants” IS INTERVENTION IN THE AUTHORITY OF THE HOME. Every law enforcement office in the state is already confessing to me that they can not possibly become parents to every child who ACTUALLY NEEDS IT. It is just not possible, but my wife and I would take in such a child.

By: Bill Long

Bill Long — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:48:09 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more Rick. As a former director of a private non profit association of non profit agencies serving families and children who are in foster care homes or institutions because prevention programs like these were not there, it makes no sense to cut these programs. Stimulus or no Stimulus money – the State needs to step up to the plate and keep these programs available to kids and familes.