DR. BOB'S DAILY

                                     an interesting observation made by Dr. Bob Sears

The Financial Impact of SB 277 for California

First, let me stress that we don't know for sure what the exact numbers are. These numbers are fairly close. The key, however, is to let Legislators know about these big-ticket items as concepts that represent hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions.

Here is what I anticipate the financial impact will be:

The number of CA children who submitted Personal Belief Exemptions (PBEs) last year is approximately 225,000. In public schools it was about 157,000. The Legislature must consider the possibility that all such students will no longer attend school if this bill passes as a worst-case scenario.

We know that public schools receive about $8867.00 per student per year. Multiply this by the 157,000 public school students, that could mean $1.4 Billion would not be given to school districts statewide due to the loss of school enrollment. Technically, the STATE isn't losing this money, they would be saving it. BUT, this would mean the budgets of public schools statewide would drop by this amount. How many teachers and other school employees would lose their jobs due to this lost school revenue?

There is also federal money lost for schools: $550.00 per student per year. There are about 6.2 million public school students K-12 in CA. With a PBE rate of about 2.54%, that equals about 157,000 students. That would equal about $86 million dollars per year that the state would NOT receive from the federal government.

What about private schools? There are an estimated 27,000 PBEs submitted form private schools K-12. Average private school tuition is about $15,000 per year. That equals about $400 Million dollars that Californians would not spend in private schools.

Daycares are an additional factor. Public daycares reported about 13,000 PBEs and private had about 10,400 PBEs. Daycare costs are estimated at about $10,000 per year. This equals $234 Million not spent in daycares each year.

Every child who homeschools will also have to have a parent who quits his or her job to stay home. Every dual-income family will now become a single-income family.

The income lost to CA families could be determined by estimating 100,000 parents quitting their jobs. If we use a mean income of $50,000 per year, that equals $5,000,000,000. That's 5 billion dollars.

Tax revenue potentially lost to CA: 10% of this lost revenue is about $500 million.

What will be the actual cost of running this bill? We don't know. But I can guarantee that it will be much more than the cost of providing medical care for the 24 school-age children with measles.

An unexpected consequence of this bill could also be the shift in philanthropic support of schools and school children. We know from several research studies that the higher the educational level and income of parents, the more likely they are to question vaccines and under-vaccinate their children or choose non-vaccination. If these families are forced out of the school systems, their fund-raising philanthropic support of schools will shift into the home-school programs. The fiscal impact of this shift is difficult to anticipate.

Finally, there are about 79,000 children with autism in CA school. Many of these families don't continue to vaccinate because of their fragile neurologic status. Yet, most won't qualify for medical exemption because the medical community does not recognize these conditions as a valid reason to decline vaccines. These kids need school services more than anyone - they need the social interaction and special education services that cannot be duplicated in an isolated home setting. This bill unfairly robs these kids of the services they need. If many have to leave the school system, how much state and federal funding for school special education programs will be lost?

The financial impact isn't the only factor to consider. Here are some of the serious societal effects that the financial aspects this bill will have that we can stress to Legislators:

Single-parent families who don't hold to the medical belief that vaccines are important for their children cannot afford to homeschool, and this bill singles them out and targets them as a group.

Low-income families are also a target of this bill as they cannot afford to homeschool and will now feel coerced into vaccinating as a group.

Many families will have to leave California.

Large and small businesses may leave California over this bill. Our state already has a difficult time retaining businesses here. Those businesses who have a large percentage of employees who don't vaccinated or whose owners or CEOs don't hold to the medical belief that vaccines are the right choice for their children might see this bill as the last straw that finally drives them out of California.