Please note: This article is reprinted directly from MedicalKidnap.com. It is being presented here in four installments due to length. This is the 2nd installment. The article in its entirety can be found here: link to complete article
by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff
Picking Your Child: The Child Trafficking Business
With the passing of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997 (ASFA), came the Title IV-E funds, which now limited the amount of money available for each child in foster care, and instead encouraged incentives for adoptions, creating a cash stream that was loosely regulated and could be easily siphoned into the state’s general budget. Critics of ASFA claim that abused children are often returned home after their foster care funds are maxed when they become a liability to the state’s coffers (since abused children are not considered adoptable), and that more children who aren’t in imminent danger of abuse are being placed into foster care since they are more attractive adoption commodities.
According to Nev Moore:
Very few children who are being used to supply the adoption market are hollow-eyed tykes from Appalachia. Very few are crack babies from the projects. [Oh… you thought those were the children they were saving? Think again.] When you are marketing a product you have to provide a desirable product that sells. In the adoption business that would be nice kids with reasonably good genetics who clean up good.
Clinton directed HHS to develop an Internet site to “link children in foster care with adoptive families.” So we will be able to window shop for children on a government web site. If you don’t find anything you like there, you can surf on over to the ‘Adopt Shoppe.’ (Source: Adoption Bonuses-The Money Behind the Madness)
There is no shortage of children entering foster care and subsequently being adopted out, as one can see from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFACRS) below:
Image Source: Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFACRS)
From Foster Care to Adoption, Lots of Money to be Made
In the article Where the Money Comes From: Paying for Child Welfare Services, Tim Ross declares:
The United States spent almost $26 billion on child welfare services in federal fiscal year 2006, the last year for which detailed information is available. The federal government provided over $12 billion, state governments almost $11 billion, and local governments almost $3 billion. This money comes from numerous programs: at least 43 separate federal funding streams can be used to pay for child welfare services.
Most federal funding, however, comes from five sources: Titles IV-B and IV-E of the Social Security Act, the Social Services Block Grant, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and Medicaid. Because federal regulations require that states provide matching funds to claim reimbursement for most of these programs, federal funding plays a large role in how states and localities spend their own child welfare dollars.
Title IV-E is the largest source of federal funds, accounting for $6 billion of spending. Title IV-E is an entitlement program that provides states with funding for foster care, adoption assistance, youth transitioning out of foster care to adulthood (funded through the Chafee Act) and administration. Generally, IV-E funding is based on the number of children receiving assistance and for children in foster care, the number of days in care. Only children from families that meet the eligibility criteria for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which ended in 1996, are eligible for Title IV-E.
Title IV-B provides about a tenth of the annual funding of IV-E ($637 million) and can be used for services to prevent child maltreatment, to help reunify families, and to maintain a qualified workforce, among other uses. Unlike Title IV-E, Title IV-B funding is capped—a fixed amount is allocated to each state each year.
Both the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and Social Security Block Grant (SSBG) programs can be used by states for many social services, of which child welfare is only one. The amounts allocated by states to child welfare from TANF and SSBG vary from year to year. Arkansas, for example, more than doubled its TANF spending on child welfare services between FY2004 and FY2006, while New Mexico eliminated TANF funds for child welfare during the same period. In 2006, states spent $2.3 billion from TANF and $1.6 billion from SSBG on child welfare.
Medicaid also covers some child welfare services, above and beyond standard health care expenditures for regular checkups, dental work, and the like. These services include targeted case management or rehabilitative services, such as behavioral health and some residential care services. Medicaid spending on child welfare services came to almost $1.4 billion, though some states were not able to break out this spending from other Medicaid expenditures.
The structure of federal financing provides strong support to some types of child welfare services and comparatively little to others. Federal funding, for example, may provide up to 83 percent of the cost of foster care in some states, as well as significant subsidies to families who adopt children from foster care. Funding for services to prevent placement in foster care and to help children already in foster care reunify with their families is much less.
To see how your state spends these funds, click the link on the map below:
End 2nd Installment
