Economic Domestic Violence Against Children

If it is the last thing I do, I will make our lawmakers bow down and say "Medicaid fraud in child welfare" in public, loudly.

Poor people cannot lobby but we do have an internet presence and we do vote.

My response to the reintroduction of Violence Against Women's Act Op-Ed by U.W. Representative John Conyers, Jr.

Of course it is optimal for the posterity of the nation to target, as an immediate point of origin, the population of children, to prevent domestic violence, but this may only be done by recognizing a far more pervasive form of domestic violence entrenched within our society, and that is economic domestic violence.

Economic domestic violence is the ugly monster conceived under the darkness of regulation which survives without its natural predator of penalty, to launch multiple attacks upon the nation's health care system for children: Medicaid, CHIP and TRICARE.

Each incident of economic domestic violence against children must be considered as the individual filing of false claims, kiddy kickbacks, kiddy dumping, phantom services and double-billing under child welfare programs. Collectively, the pattern of practice of fraud, waste and abuse in child welfare services (i.e. foster care and adoption) have resulted in nothing less than a reign of economic terror upon our national treasures, the children.

Each year, hundreds of billions of dollars are violently taken from children under the guise of their best interest and no one will speak upon this. As a nation we have publicly acknowledged Medicare fraud with the intense partnership between the put children at risk as simply witnessed in income inequalities and its dramatic rise in poverty.

Until issues of fraud, waste and abuse in child welfare are included in the discussion, any legislation which does not provide for the amelioration of economic domestic violence against the children and their caretakers, is reduced to a political folly.