"The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invested heavily in school-based health clinics, and it has sought imaginative ways to implement them in the states under the guise of other programs."
"A power elite in this country controls a great deal of wealth and governmental power without any public accountability," charges Genevieve Young of the Center on Exempt Organization Responsibility, a Kentucky-based watchdog group that monitors the grant-making activities of American foundations. "This power elite," Young observes, "resides in the realm of philanthropy, the world of tax-exempt wealth where money flows freely for lofty-sounding purposes. Philanthropy has been a sacred cow in this country, nearly untouchable, and a rarely-questioned force for what was thought to be good."
In a speech reprinted in the current issue of the Education Reporter, Young notes that "several major tax-exempt foundations were involved in the operations and staffing of the Clinton White House Health Care Task Force." Their involvement, she contends, "showed us that the foundations are teaming up with executive officials, at the federal and state levels, to perform an end-run around Congressional appropriations authority and lobbying laws to get programs implemented in the executive agencies without the knowledge and consent of our elected representatives." These efforts are "actively undermining the American form of republican government."
Young warns that Hillary Health Care is "not yet dead." Advocates of socialized medicine are "sneaking their statist health agenda past the statehouse and in through the schoolhouse door," she says. "Health care reform has been reincarnated as welfare and education reform. With financial support from major private philanthropies like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Annie E. Casey, Rockefeller, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, a new framework of public-private partner-ships in education and welfare is being proposed."
Young charges that state officials across America are creating "a crazy quilt of legal authority for school-based clinics" by relying on "private foundation grant programs, federal grants from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Goals 2000 for Education, a Medicaid benefit known as the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment Services, and the availability of Medicaid waivers."
Genevieve Young describes how Pennsylvania legislators "discovered that school clinics were being instituted in Pennsylvania, and Medicaid monies were being used to fund school health services, but that no legislative authority existed for the conduct of these activities." With her assistance, legislators obtained copies of grant proposals and other documents revealing "shocking instances of secret meetings between foundation officers and their consultants with state officials, promises by state officials . . . to provide the necessary Executive Orders and narrow legislative authority for certain activities, and promises to fund foundation programs with taxpayer dollars if the foundation would [provide] seed money." Young concludes that the foundations were "buying legislation and regulatory changes."
