Cheshire Cat Government

If you're a Nebraskan, or if you've kept up with Nebraska news over the last few years, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the Nebraska Department of Health & Human Services - also known as HHS - and their failed child welfare privatization efforts are in the news again.

This time, the very public release of a highly critical audit of the Nebraska HHS by State Auditor Mike Foley has appeared to have struck speechless many in Nebraska's state government - especially Gov. Dave Heineman.

Of course, we don't believe that either Heineman, Nebraska state senators, or officials at HHS are truly shocked.

The man in charge of the Nebraska HHS, Kerry Winterer, disagrees vehemently with many of Foley's findings. Whether Winterer's department was actively hiding the negative facts that Foley has since discovered, or HHS was simply privatized into incompetence doesn't change the fact that this privatization effort has been an utter failure.

The disasters of privatizing Nebraska's child welfare & juvenile services system are a subject we discussed even before we began publishing the Daily Felltoon. History has proven our hypothesis correct, that the privatization of Nebraska's child welfare system wouldn't work, would cost the state more money, and would be less effective for the most important users of the system, kids.

Foley's audit appears to have finally assigned finite costs to those failures. While his conclusions are extremely disconcerting, they don't surprise us. Under the failed privatization effort of Nebraska's child welfare & juvenile services system, costs went up, not down, as was promised by Republicans who jammed the plan through the Unicameral. Millions of dollars of state funds were spent on overpayments to private providers. Some of those same providers of services to kids - like foster care monitoring - went out of business, even after overpayment, as the privatization was never designed to pay them the full cost of their efforts, anyway. Confidential patient info was improperly shared, and several subcontractors were underpaid, or even unpaid.

In short, the effort to privatize a government system that was supposed to take care of Nebraska's most needy children has now destroyed that system, given millions of Nebraska tax dollars to private companies, and left no system capable of handling the juvenile services needs of thousands of Nebraska kids.

The question that many Nebraskans - and truthfully, people across the country - should be asking is this: Where was Governor Dave Heineman while all this was going on? He had been one of the driving forces behind the effort to privatize HHS - yet six weeks after HHS received a draft copy of Foley's audit, they hadn't discussed it with the Governor, and apparently, the Governor has yet to read the report.

What was the Republican governor of Nebraska doing instead of taking care of the needs of Nebraska's children? Grinning from ear to ear, bragging and talking up the state (that he's supposed to be running) to more than a hundred business representatives from foreign countries.

Disgustingly, it appears that nearly everyone connected with this HHS privatization effort has had a cheshire cat plan all along. Just keep smiling and nodding, while shoveling the tax dollars of Nebraskans into the pockets of their business buddies. Just keep smiling until the problem fades off the pages of the newspaper and disappears from view. Just like the Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland disappears in the classic animated feature, bit by bit.

Thankfully, due to the diligent Mr. Foley, we have a feeling Gov. Heineman and others aren't smiling that Cheshire Cat smile today.