Why Are California’s Children’s Hospitals So Much Nicer Than Other Services for Kids?

A System of Medical Centers Has Grown Up—and Offers an Example of a More Generous Golden State

I wish California children were doing as well as California children’s hospitals.

Even as the Golden State has maintained the nation’s highest child poverty rate, underfunded its schools, and made housing prohibitively expensive for families, California has developed a system of children’s hospitals that seems to occupy a parallel universe in which kids’ needs actually come first.

California has 13 children’s hospitals—eight private not-for-profits (in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Loma Linda, Oakland, Palo Alto, and Madera) and five within University of California medical centers. Collectively, they receive more than …