The Grand Island Independent - Meister Seeks Reform of State's Department of Health and Human Services

News Article

By Robert Pore

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services is "badly broken" and not serving the needs of troubled youth and foster parents, said Mike Meister, Democratic candidate for governor.

Meister was campaigning in Grand Island on Friday.

He said problems with Health and Human Services are impacting the entire state.

"In Grand Island, a lot of the problems circulate around foster parents not getting paid," Meister said. "Something has to give in the system. It is just terribly, terribly broken. Our children are not commodities. They are our future, and we need to take care of them and do things right."

Meister said the state's attempt to privatize the foster care system has failed and is having a negative impact on those foster children most vulnerable under a broken system.

Meister advocates scraping the private program of foster care.

"I think we need to get back in the track of having enough workers to take care of people," he said.

"It is important to keep these kids out of the juvenile justice system, which will ultimately cost us money," he said. "If we get a kid hooked up into the right program and have somebody that can pay attention to them and have a social worker that is a mentor to that child, then what we have effectively done is eliminate that long-term cost to society with that person and hopefully make a productive member of society out of them."

Meister said Nebraska needs to hire "social workers at the local level to do the work."

"These call center things that they are trying to do, don't work," he said. "You can't get information from Omaha if you live in Grand Island. Someone in Grand Island knows what the services are, but somebody in Omaha doesn't. We have to have it localized."

Another aspect of Meister's plan to address problems facing Health and Human Services is to "break Health and Human Services into regional areas."

"They wouldn't necessary be on county lines or based on those traditional models," he said.

For example, instead of Grand Island, Hastings and Kearney lumped into one model, each community would be a hub for a specific region of the state it borders. Meister said that would allow for much better coverage and taking care of clients a lot better instead of following traditional models where, "people in Broken Bow aren't taking those kids to Gering but instead going to Kearney."

A theme of Meister's campaign is allowing for more local control in communities that have a better handle on the problems facing local people instead of bureaucrats in the state capital.

He said the current system of government focuses too much control into the hands of this "bureaucratic layer of private interest and administrators and all these incredible layers of waste, and the people on the bottom are getting squeezed."

For example, while state lawmakers are troubled with unfunded mandates from the federal government, local governments also face the same dilemma with state lawmakers mandating programs without the necessary funding to implement them.

"What I want to do is invert that pyramid and put the governor at the bottom and put the people on the top who are more important," Meister said. "I'm a Jefferson Democrat because I believe in fiscal responsibility and in local control and that government should be there to help but not tell you what to do. If we can get people to understand that we need to take the state back and we need to take our lives back, then we will get somewhere."

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