(If you do not know what ALEC is – please read the links at the end of this entry – it is very important for you to understand the implications of this organization.)
There are many aspects of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that disturb me. The fact that our state legislators are going to ALEC meetings and bringing ALEC “Model Legislation” back to our states for implementation – legislation that citizens of that state neither need nor want - is foremost.
ALEC’s belief that they alone know what is best for the United States is another aspect of their philosophy that I find revolting – since their focus on all of the “Model Legislation” provided to our states legislators to implement is entirely – corporate focused and private sector designed, based on ALEC’s belief in the “Free market” economy and ALEC’s desire to privatize every aspect of government.
On to today’s example of ALEC desire for privatization of government entities…
I think it is important for all to understand that the privatization model of government that ALEC is espousing is an unproven model – based solely on their belief in a “free market” philosophy and their private sector members desire to privatize government services.
The ALEC model has never been proven as workable - therefore all of their attempts at privatization of government services should be viewed as nothing more than “free market” experiments. With any experiment you need to take into consideration the variables surrounding the execution of the “experiment” and adjust for those variables, which in my opinion ALEC never does. ALEC takes an experimental hypothesis, accepts it as truth, implements it and calls it a success. ALEC reports only positive results from all their experiments – which is statistically impossible. But, ALEC can’t report the failures, because by doing so, they are proving that their “free market” experiments in government do not work.
Many Americans have become the experimental subjects of ALEC “Model Legislation” “free market” experiments unbeknownst to them. “Model Legislation” that is brought back by our legislators from ALEC meetings or from the ALEC webpage and the “free market” experiment begins in our state.
In the ALEC Annual Report 2001 they note that “Commitment to free-market reforms has also led the Task Force to develop privatization policies in the areas of adoption and foster care services”.
This was the beginning of what I will refer to as an ALEC “Free market” experiment of foster care.
Many of you are familiar with Taylor’s time and motion studies. Taylor believed that if management and the employees worked together in unison that they could develop innovative procedures that led to greater efficiency in the industry. This is the core of the thinking behind ALEC’s view of foster care – they were promoting increased “efficiency” and “innovation” in the foster care program. This is a business model that ALEC used as an experiment in the area of foster care, an experiment in which none of the human variables were considered, because the Taylor theory is an industry model.
Foster care is not industry. Children are not widgets. Children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, and any member of a family unit are not cogs in a piece of machinery to be experimented with to achieve greater efficiency and innovation.
Four states were noted by ALEC as their success stories in the “privatization of foster care.” These states were Kansas, Florida, Michigan and Nebraska. All of them implemented some type of privatization of their foster care system that ALEC lauded and wrote about in their literature.
The results of these “free market experiments” included
“Parents and grandparents testified during four days of hearings in the Kansas House that the state and its contracted social workers ignored their appeals and took children away without full explanations. They also accuse contractors of keeping children in state custody to drive up their profits.”
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A legislative committee has advanced a measure to halt privatization of parts of Nebraska's child welfare system.
In 2008, the state Department of Health and Human Services began to transfer control of child and family services to independent contractors. But the state has lost three providers since last spring. Two of the companies that left said the state wasn't paying them enough.
Colorado child-welfare officials have watched these horror stories and many others unfold in foster homes chosen and supervised by private foster-care businesses.
Yet, the state has done little or nothing to punish the businesses responsible for the children whose lives were damaged.
In Florida, a private contractorsent abused and neglected children to sleep in conference rooms in an office building, sometimes for weeks, a state judge found.
The Florida State Department of Children and Families (DCF) spent $27.5 million on five pilot programs set up to privatize child welfare services from 1997-2000. Even though four of the five pilots failed, Florida is forging ahead with a statewide plan to privatize foster care and all related services into Community-Based Care (CBC) programs.
**
A position paper released by Children’s Rightshad the following two conclusions
- Public agencies should not expect to save money through privatization,
given the real costs of developing, implementing, and overseeing a
privatization initiative and the costs associated with providing a full
array of services to children and families under expectations of
higher quality.
- Absent significant attention to the factors that undermine efficiency in
the public sector, all parties should recognize that greater efficiency will not
be achieved simply because a private agency has assumed primary
responsibility for service provision
(I apologize for the "bold" paragrph - I tried multiple times to correctand could not.)
**
In 2006 Humphrey, Turnbull and Turnbull reported in the Journal of Disability Policy Studies that the “switch to managed care in child welfare occurred without significant empirical evidence that managed care improves outcomes for children and families, or that it lowers child- welfare services costs” and “there was no clear evidence that privatization is either more or less effective than public service delivery”. Based on their study they found that in Kansas
Mental-health services were more difficult to access after privatization
Privatization has led to lack of appropriate placements for youth
Aftercare services have been inadequate since privatization.
Caseload levels at private agencies are too high.
Turnover in staff was high in private agencies.
Most believed that families receive fewer services while
their children are in care than in the past.
***
Rolan Zullo in a meta-analysis research papertitled “Child Welfare Privatization and Child Welfare: Can the two be efficiently reconciled?” notes
The conundrum, in a nutshell, is that service through contract, regardless of design, imposes economic value on specific outcomes. And private contractors systematically respond to the incentives or risks in the contract: when the contract provides rewards for private firms to move children rapidly toward adoption, children are adopted (Blackstone et al. 2004; Unruh & Hodgkin 2004); when the payment arrangement penalizes private firms for cases where children remain in out-of-home care for extended periods, children rapidly return to their biological parents or to adoption (Meezan & McBeath 2003); when private firms are paid a fixed rate for foster-care placements, regardless of duration, children remain in temporary care (Zullo 2002). Clearly, the contract terms shape the behavior of private providers.
The consistency of this finding implies that private contractors make decisions regarding children that are based on their agencies financial interests, rather than what is best for the child. There is no easy way to avoid this tension.
His findings included
1. There is no evidence that privatizing child welfare services reduces costs.
2. Privatizing requires additional state resources to monitor and administer
the contract.
3. Privatizing increases the level of bureaucratic management tasks.
Another
Legislative
Experimental
Catastrophe
So What?
The state legislators brought this ALEC “Model Legislation” foster care experiment back to their states. They implemented this ALEC experiment on the citizens of their state. The subsequent research shows that the experiment for efficiency and innovation in foster care did not work. ALEC then dropped their focus on this specific “Model Legislation” and moved on to other foster care privatization experiments, but the citizens of these states are stuck with it and other states may become victims of bad research, because ALEC only reports successes.
Do we really want our legislators to bring “free market” “Model Legislation” experiments aimed at privatization of government services for the benefit of the private sector into our states?
Do we want the families of the United States, to be subjects of a “free market” based experiment?
Do we want to allow ALEC to continue to manipulate and experiment with state government for the benefit of their private sector members under the guise of efficiency and proposed cost savings?
Do we want a private organization, such as ALEC determining the legislation in our states, rather than the needs of the constituency that our legislators are elected to serve?
Do we want the United States to be a “free market” experiment perpetuated by ALEC “Model Legislation” introduced by your state and federal legislators?
If your answer is no to any of these questions you must work to remove state legislators who are currently members of ALEC from office.
If your answer is no to any of these questions you must work to remove all ALEC Alumni from the Federal government.
Our government is suppose to be “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and it is time that we take our government back from private interests like ALEC and the only way we can do that is to remove their past and current members from State and Federal office.
ALEC legislative members (state and federal) are complicit in the “free market” experiment on America.
If you don’t know what ALEC is – please read this, or this, or this, or this.