Court Opinion

ID: 9746187
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:07:41.351175+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:10.688881
License: Public Domain

STRANKMAN, P. J.
I concur in the result. Appellant’s central claim is that a child dependency determination that a mother is drug addicted and unable to provide regular care for her child is, standing alone, sufficient to establish the mother’s physical incapacity for purposes of federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits so as to entitle the foster parent (appellant grandmother) to collect those benefits for the child’s welfare. The claim must be denied since federal regulations require that a demonstration of AFDC parental incapacity “shall be supported by competent medical testimony . . . .” (45 C.F.R. § 233.90(c)(l)(iv) (1995).) Here, no medical testimony of any kind was pursued or presented. Appellant rested her AFDC application upon no more than conclusory statements by social workers from the dependency proceeding that the mother is drug addicted. Accordingly, benefits were properly denied and we need not reach the question of whether the state regulation requesting a physician’s written statement to verify parental incapacity impermissibly narrows the federal regulation by establishing a physician’s statement as the only form of acceptable medical testimony.
I therefore write separately to disavow the majority’s gratuitous approval of the state regulation which is interpreted to confine a foster parent’s presentation of “competent medical testimony” to a physician’s written statement containing a diagnoses of the biological parent’s condition—a statement that is confidential and inaccessible to the foster parent absent the beneficent cooperation of a biological parent who has demonstrated an inability to care for the welfare of her child. The aim of AFDC to assure care for needy children will fall tragically short if we place such unreasonable burdens upon their foster parents’ entitlement to benefits.