A Knot in the Day Care Tangle

Abstract

Dennis R. Young Policy analysts can become so enamored of their own models that they forget the limitations of those models, and in the process lose sight of reality. Gordon Lewis's The Day Care Tangle' provides an illustration. Lewis's otherwise careful study was awarded the prize for best paper by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management last October. But Lewis's analysis is seriously flawed because it violates the very principle it seeks to promotethat one should analyze a given public program in the larger context of the systems within which it operates. Lewis fears that public policymakers often fail to achieve their objectives because they ignore in their deliberations the interactions of relevant systems. To illustrate his thesis, Lewis analyzes federal program reforms in 1981 as they affected state day care services, taking Pennsylvania as a case in point. His model shows how Title XX, AFDC, Medicaid, and state day care policies interact to determine net per family outlays faced by low-income families and by state and federal governments. He asserts that, contrary to the intent of both the state and the federal government, day care expenditures increased because of changes in AFDC eligibility rules that encouraged families to switch from cheap private day care, to expensive public care under Title XX. Lewis only grudgingly acknowledges that other things were going on besides changes in incentives: In cutting back on AFDC, the federal government increased the attractiveness of public day care to families, even though the cost of subsidized day care is greater than the cost of AFDC and other benefits combined. If the federal government did not suffer from these changes, it was only because Title XX funds are capped, whereas AFDC funds and Medicaid are not; accordingly, the federal government's losses were limited.