THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 28, 1995 TAG: 9506280027
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Critics said it shouldn't be done: that the Clinton administration's premise for its highly ballyhooed Vaccines for Children program was faulty, that the program's costs would be high and its benefits few.
Now comes the Republican Congress to scrap the federal program and hand the problem of underimmunization and federal block grants to the states. If that's predictable GOP response, it's also wise public policy. A General Accounting Office report released earlier this month confirms the original criticisms:
The Clintons claimed that cost was the major bar to toddler and preschool vaccinations, that vaccine manufacturers profiteered ``at the expense of our children.'' Not so, says the GAO, confirming the experience of health-care professionals nationwide and locally. Cost is not the reason that as many as 90 percent of some inner cities' preschoolers don't get their recommended immunizations.
Ignorance and inaccessibility are the main reasons for child underimmunization, which ``is limited to certain population groups and areas often referred to as pockets of need . . . where conditions are ripe for disease outbreaks.'' Yet the GAO report continues, the government ``has no way to ensure that Vaccines for Children is reaching the target population'' and ``cannot guarantee that the children who need vaccine will get it.''
The feds' record-keeping is so poor that it confuses the number of children immunized and the doses of vaccine distributed, cannot detect waste, fraud or diversion of vaccine and cannot keep up with or keep track of orders for vaccine.
Vaccines for Children will cost taxpayers some $457 million this year - and its primary beneficiaries are not the children whose parents can't afford to pay or don't take their toddlers for free shots at public-health clinics.
This program aimed at a problem that isn't, didn't solve the problem that is, and exacerbated two other ``ills'' symptomatic of the current welfare system: increasing demand among middle-class families for the same ``free'' services middle-class taxpayers provide the poor, and increasing demand by the poor that ``free'' services be brought to them.
The nation can't afford to provide middle-class Americans more services they can afford. It also can't afford not to provide immunizations to preschoolers who don't get them. But it can't afford, either, to spend more than necessary on any federal program, and better ways exist than buying up vaccine supplies, distributing them free to all and neither accounting for the expenditures nor alleviating the underimmunization problem.
Why not tie proof of immunization of that target population of 2-year-olds to the welfare payments and other services those toddlers' mothers receive? States and localities like Norfolk have had some success taking immunization to target neighborhoods, to schools, to churches.
Despite the evidence, the Clinton administration opposes major revisions. Too bad: Underimmunization of American children cries out for an efficient response. Vaccines for Children isn't providing it. by CNB