Low-income families who don't qualify for federal child care subsidies often turn to home-based care providers. These providers tend to have less formal education, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. By offering the poorest families insufficient assistance to access excellent child care and by denying help to millions more low-income families, the federal government is effectively lowering the quality of child care available to a huge segment of the American public.