Insurance groups constitute the third group of advocates for (pro-daycare legislation). Walker* explained that insurance companies welcome Federal standards because such standards reduced the policing costs of insuring (daycare) centers. Insurance underwriters can reduce their companies' fiscal responsibilities by including in their contracts a provision stating that they will not be liable for any mishap that occurs in a center in violation of Federal standards.
Walker conjectured that these parents (who support pro-daycare legislation) might not favor (it) if they knew that its probable outcome would be a decline, not an improvement in day care, since (it) would reduce all the market mechanism that help to ensure quality.
Parents may also be misguided in their support...in that they are misinformed about the cost. When a service is paid for out of general tax funds, users of that service often fall into "fiscal illusion," not knowing the true cost of the service. If parents had to pay for this (daycare) service on the market, perhaps they would not demand it at the price paid indirectly through government.
...(Mary) Kohler* ventured that the recent spate of criticism of public education has dampened public desire to place children in day care. At the same time that Americans are learning that the public schools are not very good, day-care advocates are asking them to put more preschoolers in similar circumstances.
Returning to the question of media, Christensen*invoked the work of Christopher Lasch, who discusses how since news has become a commodity, those who profit by it try to produce as much as possible. The natural consequence among the media is an unhealthy appetite for novelty and strangeness. In media coverage of day care, this predictably means that reporters will gravitate toward those proposing something new [putting children into the care of experts], not toward those advocating something old [allowing parents to care for their own children].