Yes, it points to how hard & expensive any government attempt to backstop the traditional parental model of care actually is.
The earlier the intervention the better.. and consistency is also incredible important. But you can spend incredible amounts of money just to get a slightly worse outcome than what was going to happen on its own. As a wealthy society we must do something to help those in need, especially children who are in the situation of no fault of their own. But it's not clear our current methods work.
You can also generalize this problem to the healthcare industry as a whole. Costs go up much faster than the rest of the basket of goods & services citizens pay for, and they don't understand why.
The underlying reason is that - care doesn't scale. You are essentially (directly or indirectly) paying for someone's (doctor, nurse, etc) time. We have not gotten much better at making care more time efficient in the field, and in many cases it has gotten worse (more paperwork/electronic record entry time/etc). Everything else we buy is the product of using automation to replace labor, making labor more efficient, or making labor cheaper (offshoring / simplifying so less training is needed / etc).
The earlier the intervention the better.. and consistency is also incredible important. But you can spend incredible amounts of money just to get a slightly worse outcome than what was going to happen on its own. As a wealthy society we must do something to help those in need, especially children who are in the situation of no fault of their own. But it's not clear our current methods work.
You can also generalize this problem to the healthcare industry as a whole. Costs go up much faster than the rest of the basket of goods & services citizens pay for, and they don't understand why.
The underlying reason is that - care doesn't scale. You are essentially (directly or indirectly) paying for someone's (doctor, nurse, etc) time. We have not gotten much better at making care more time efficient in the field, and in many cases it has gotten worse (more paperwork/electronic record entry time/etc). Everything else we buy is the product of using automation to replace labor, making labor more efficient, or making labor cheaper (offshoring / simplifying so less training is needed / etc).