Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Everybody liked the policy. It turned out to be a disaster that has taken the past quarter-century to fix.
Not that the idea was meritless. But the near-universal support for it was based on paradoxical expectations.
Patients could be treated more effectively if out in the community among family and friends, it was argued, than if kept warehoused in big institutions. Plus, it was reasoned, taxpayer money could be saved by reducing the number of institutionalized patients.
If only things were so easy.
Because better treatment should eventually increase the number of patients who recover and regain productive lives, you theoretically should save money by replacing institutional care with better, community-based treatment. In the long run, that is.
Short-term, though, money wasn't spent that should have been - to make careful patient-by-patient evaluations (to determine, for instance, whether they even had family or friends to welcome them back into their communities), and to establish the community-based treatment facilities and programs upon which the policy's success depended.
Several of the causes that today preoccupy Virginians and Americans suggest the same dynamic: They're widely supported, but for paradoxical reasons that could pose trouble for them.
Consider, for example, the widely supported case for jettisoning affirmative action.
On the one hand, it is argued, the time has passed for formal programs to widen opportunities for racial minorities and women in education and the work place. The process of demolishing traditional discriminatory barriers is now so far along, it is argued, that affirmative action is no longer needed to keep it going.
On the other hand, it is argued, affirmative action has hurt white males who've been penalized by "reverse discrimination" that favors nonwhites and women. For white males, ending affirmative action will halt the slide.
How can both arguments be right? If the continued advance of women and minorities toward parity is inevitable, then white males will find their relative position continuing to deteriorate, affirmative action or no. But if ending affirmative action is to maintain or improve white males' position, which by all evidence is still advantaged, it means the gains by women and minorities will have ceased.
Or consider "welfare reform." Who doesn't favor it?
The system demeans those who rely on it for permanent, albeit meager, support. It sustains a culture that passes spiritual and economic impoverishment from generation unto generation. It bleeds taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars.
Transforming the welfare culture and saving money are both legitimate goals - but that doesn't automatically make them compatible, in the short term anyway.
Virginia - counting on an expanding economy, day-care provisions and partnerships with private-sector organizations and churches - hopes to do both.
Maybe it'll work. But if chronic welfare dependency is so demeaning as advertised, why expect those who have been chronically dependent suddenly to become good prospects for employment?
Economies don't expand continually (and one drawback of the block-grant approach favored by Congress is that it doesn't respond automatically to regional or state-by-state variations in economic conditions). Guaranteed health-care insurance for the working poor appears more distant than ever. Nothing could be worse than welfare as we've known it - except, possibly, welfare as we'll come to know it if the implications of the paradoxical motives for reform aren't addressed.
And while we're on the subject, why is welfare for the poor inherently worse than welfare for the wealthy - agribusiness subsidies, tax breaks for million-dollar mortgages, cut-rate grazing fees on federal lands, etc.?
You don't suppose this might have something to do with who wields power and who doesn't, who has political money to spread and who doesn't? Maybe this is no paradox, but rather another visit from an old and familiar political acquaintance, self-serving hypocrisy.
by CNB