New at Reason: A. Barton Hinkle on How to Make Child Care Like Health Care

November 29, 2011

Nancy Pelosi once had trouble finding a babysitter. So her aspiration these days is "doing for child care what we did for health care reform"—pushing a comprehensive solution. In fact, it's not just an aspiration—it's at the top of her agenda. This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. But if "we" really are going to do for child care what we have done for health care, the U.S. will have to take some intermediate steps in order to replicate the experience faithfully.

First, the U.S. should create a labor shortage by launching a major war and drafting men and women to fight. Then it should impose wage and price controls, as Washington did during WWII, to prevent employers from bidding up the price of labor. Practices such as these will encourage employers to compete for scarce labor by offering non-wage benefits. Professional child care associations would have to lobby Congress for market-entry barriers requiring providers to obtain highly restricted licenses for performing even the most mundane procedures. Washington then should enact two major new entitlement programs akin to Medicaid and Medicare. As the share of GNP devoted to child care begins to spiral out of control and the government assumes control of 50 cents out of every child-care dollar, liberals and progressives should argue that this proves the current free market in child care doesn't work, so the government should stop sitting on the sidelines and step in to fix everything.

View this article.