California should not bail out foster care agencies

By Richard Wexler, special to CalMatters

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California’s private foster care agencies are heading back to Sacramento, demanding another taxpayer bailout to cover rising insurance costs. Cal Matters reported recently that state foster care agencies want another $30 million on top They received $31.5 million last year.

One of the many reasons these agencies shouldn’t get a bailout — or any help at all — can be found in the very reason they’re in trouble: insurance costs are rising because so many children have been abused while under surveillance they can finally get compensation. This fact alone should be enough to cast doubt on the claims of foster care agencies about the miracles they supposedly work and the disaster that would supposedly befall children if they went out of business.

Other reasons to ignore the fear mongering can be found in the CalMatters story: more than 24 of these agencies are now closed. All the horrors described in the story are hypothetical. There is not a single instance in which all have come true. The worst example in history involves a pair of foster parents who were inconvenienced.

This should come as no surprise. The calls for a new bailout and other remedies that would be even worse are predicated on the idea that if foster care agencies disappeared, there would be some kind of insurance-induced euphoria: all their employees, all their buildings, and all the foster parents they license would suddenly disappear.

In fact, as history has documented, governments are perfectly capable of hiring the same employees and licensing the same foster parents. They already do so for 86% of foster children in California. Do they do the job better than foster care agencies? Probably not. But there is no evidence that they are doing worse.

Consider the findings in the rare cases in which other news organizations and grand juries dug deeper: In 2013. on Los Angeles Times reported the system of foster care agencies “became more expensive and more dangerous than the government-run homes it largely replaced.” in 2016 Orange County Grand Jury found that agency foster homes were no better than county-run homes. They were just more expensive.

And last month, foster care agency agreed to pay $11.25 million to six siblings from one family to compensate them for the horrific abuse they suffered at a Riverside County home the agency runs.

Certainly, at a minimum, foster care agencies must demonstrate that they have cleaned up their act before California taxpayers divert more funds that could be used to actually serve vulnerable children and families.

If these agencies get their way, they will likely get away with similar negligence in the future, because the agencies want more than another bailout. What some call “reforms” are actually proposals to give foster care agencies almost complete immunity from lawsuits by their alleged victims.

So it’s no wonder that The Child Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law writes that these so-called reforms would impose “unprecedented conditions on foster children’s ability to receive compensation.” The institute claims that children who have been monitored by foster care agencies will be denied right to seek the same compensation provided to any other abused child or adult.

What makes this so tragic is that what these agencies call a crisis is actually an opportunity. It’s a chance to reexamine the extent to which the take-the-kid-and-run response has harmed the children it was intended to help.

Most children separated from their families do not resemble the stereotypes that come to mind when we hear the words “child abuse.” In 2024, in 85% of cases where California children were forced into foster care, there it was not an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 87% there was not even a charge of drug abuse.

For the most part, the children were taken because of “neglect,” which often means the family is poor.

This means that the so-called insurance crisis could be a chance to rethink decades-old assumptions. Every time a foster care agency closes, counties have to take another look at each child and ask: does this child really need to be in foster care?

Foster care agencies are not “critical infrastructure”; they are barriers to making all vulnerable children in California safer. California’s children and taxpayers would be better off without them.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.