DID The Rescue Of Kids Actually Begin?

What we have here is history in the making.

Recently, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee held Hearing to Review the Use of Child Welfare ComposeWaiver Demonstration Projects to Promote Child Well-Being.

From all the testimonies, there was one general consensus, that being there is a need to continue the waivers in child welfare.

For those of you who are not familiar with the child welfare waiver demonstrations, I shall attempt to sum it up in a nutshell.

Child welfare waivers came down a few years ago and were presented to the worst 23 states whose child welfare system was floating to the top of the accountability barrel as a layer of dysfunctional scum. (NOTE: Michigan never got locked into this group of dysfuctional child welfare administrations due to its ability to "creatively express itself through the use of flagrant verbosity and your basic bullshit in its PIPs)

These waivers allowed states to become creative through the waiver of Title IV-E funds. Traditionally, Title IV-E funds are constrained to be used in only on particular fashion, that being the federal mandates on providing assistance to families and children to remove the children from the home to become eligible for other resources.

Simply put, a child had to be placed into foster care to become eligible for medical, housing, transportation, assistance.

These assistances are called "Home-based, community-based" under the new shift in funding.

Simply put, a child does not have to be placed into foster care for the family to become eligible for medical, housing, transportation, employment assistance.

This looks like a job for "DID" (disjointed incremental dismantlement) or the formation of policy for tearing down an archaic institution. It is not that this is the end of the protection of humans (notice how I did not segment by age in identifying children) it is a shift in funding streams to allow, for the first time in this nation, accountability and transparency of all child welfare operations under the Medicaid initiative.

There is only one missing component to "DID" this, and I am fine-tuning the details as we speak.

There seems to be policymakers in Michigan who are doing just that.

State Medicaid Director Letter From CMS August 6, 2010