Lawmakers: government is never the solution, except for when it is

They grew government last year, and now use the same excuse to do it again

Last year, Idaho lawmakers grew the state’s Medicaid program, yet again, despite 25 years of handwringing about how much money the program is costing. Their argument was that, with the state’s near-total ban on abortion, the state needed to help, as much as possible, support women in pregnancy and in the 12-months following the child’s birth.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Now, legislators are at it once more, proposing a grant program to support the Idaho’s privately-operated crisis pregnancy centers, which the bill’s backers say number about 18 statewide. According to Senate Bill 1077’s statement of purpose:

With abortion no longer generally available in Idaho, it is imperative that we provide as much support and practical aid to women facing difficult pregnancies as possible. This grant program would enable pregnancy centers to expand their community outreach quickly through things like media campaigns, or staff hiring to meet a growing demand. The initiatives undertaken by each applicant would be up to the pregnancy center itself, based upon its assessment of community needs. The legislation envisions a program which poses a minimal burden on pregnancy centers, thereby enabling them to continue their primary focus of serving Idaho's mothers and their families. The state of Idaho is prohibited from interfering with the internal policies and missions of pregnancy centers as a condition of the grants, as most pregnancy centers in Idaho are faith based.

Rep. Bruce Skaug and Sen. Ben Adams, both Nampa Republicans, report the program will cost about $1 million a year, but I know that is a gross under estimation. The bill mistakenly anticipates no additional appropriation to the state Department of Health and Welfare, which would have to review grant applications and send out awards. That requires staff, time, and money, but only the grant funding is accounted for. (The bill also includes a superfluous provision dealing with the state’s abortion informed consent law, which is clearly an attempt to entice pro-life legislators to vote for the bill even if they might be reluctant to create a new program).

Beyond that, the bill says crisis pregnancy centers that apply for the grants would receive awards “proportionate to the number of clients served by the applicant in the previous calendar year” or a $25,000 if the center has been open for a year or less. These kinds of charity-by-formula programs never work, and almost certainly backfire. The secondary effects will be:

• Pregnancy centers that would not otherwise not survive on their own in the private sector will now operate with government support, breeding inefficiency in the marketplace.

• This means pregnancy centers that ought to go out of business because they either don’t serve their communities or don’t function at a high level would continue to operate.

• This will mean that women seeking services will potentially receive less quality of care because the market forces that require charities to operate efficiently will no longer be present.

• The state government will become some crisis pregnancy centers’ biggest donors, meaning the centers will become more responsive to the state, its politicians, and bureaucrats than the donors and clients because they now have a smaller stake in the center’s outcomes.

• Private donors will be less inclined to give money to pregnancy centers, knowing that their tax dollars are instead being used to support the operations.

• Eventually, the state will put itself in the position of funding services offered by the crisis pregnancy centers. Watch, for example, new state subgrants or dictates added to the program specifically to pay for housing, transportation, and clothing.

If you doubt this is the future, consider the myriad cases in which this has already happened. In healthcare, education, and housing, the government has consumed the whole of operations that previously belonged entirely to the private sector, making everything cost more and become far less efficient.

A most recent example of the state and federal government’s take over of private charity can be found in local and state suicide prevention hotlines. Formerly privately funded and staffed, these hotlines now find themselves underfunded, understaffed, and terribly unresponsive to the communities they used to serve because they have become wholly government concerns.

Government likes to make excuses for its expansion. It makes politicians feel good that they’re doing something, even if something is already being done.

But when government expands, as I have said many times, other things shrink: the importance of individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities, charities, and churches. This will be the case again if lawmakers manage to follow through with the creation of yet another program.

Through the actions of individual Idaho donors, 18 crisis pregnancy centers sprang to life in the state. No government officials, programs, or grants were needed to make that happen. The state now threatens to upset all of that. The consequences of this will be very real, and very bad for pregnant moms and their babies.