KINDER'S COMMENTARY: PENNSYLVANIA REPRESENTATIVE FINDS SCHOOL IS NURSE, NANNY

Gov. Mel Carnahan's latest major initiative is a major transformation of Medicaid into what has all the hallmarks of a new, open-ended entitlement in the state budget. He wants to extend Medicaid to cover the children of middle-class families, including even those with incomes at 300 percent of the poverty level. This could include incomes of $48,000 for a family of four.

This doesn't happen in isolation. That is to say, what Mel Carnahan is up to here with Medicaid has liberal precedents in other states and in the fevered imaginations of some of the most liberal planners in the Clinton administration and left-wing think tanks.

Sam Rohrer is a state representative in Pennsylvania. He has done exhaustive research into programs such as School to Work, Goals 2000, workforce development, melding the departments of Education and Labor -- and now Medicaid. He call it "The Public Schools as Nurse and Nanny." Here are some excerpts from a recent speech by Rep. Rohrer:

"Medicaid has moved mainstream into our schools. It is paying salaries, funding multiple programs that boldly intrude into the sanctity of our home and is the cause of escalating state and federal budgets. ...

"While many serious problems were identified, there is one that is most serious because it breeds many others. It is that dramatic public policy shifts are simultaneously occurring in the areas of education, workforce development and health care. Almost all are through executive branch initiatives and bureaucratic maneuvering. These shifts all have one thing in common -- the realignment of control. Control is being wrested away from individuals, parents, local school boards and health care providers and, ultimately, from employers. Without dispute, these shifts, if left unaltered, will produce an economy planned not by parents and individuals, but by government fiat.

"Congress and the elected state legislatures are generally viewed as impediments that must be avoided. ... The necessary constitutional principle of checks and balances is violated and the scrutiny afforded by public and legislative debate is pre-empted.

"With Medicaid, similar changes have occurred. Originally a government-sponsored health insurance program for the poor, poverty guidelines have been dropped entirely for ages 0-21. ... Terms have been redefined ... Disability now includes reading and math deficiencies for such things as `breaking up with one's boyfriend or girlfriend.' Other terms have been expanded like `at risk,' which now means `at risk of becoming at risk.' This assures that every child can become `identified,' and once identified under Goals 2000 or Title 1 a `at risk,' can be remediated under Medicaid mental health `wrap-around services.'

"In order to provide these mental health remedial services, schools must agree to provide mental health services, which can be done through the `partial hospitalization provider status.' This is what allows the schools to provide all health-related services through the vehicle of school-based clinics. ..."

From conservative Joplin, Mo., this month comes news that notes have gone out to parents of children in grades K-5 inviting them to put their youngsters into "group therapy," courtesy of our friends in the public schools.

Group therapy? By whom? What, exactly, are the schools doing experimenting on our children?

Boiling the frog a degree at a time, the day is coming when the folks in Big Education will have everything in place. It isn't too much to say, of many of them: They're coming for your kids.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.