What a brilliant idea: Rather than simply filling prescriptions for homeless patients with medical needs, giving them a peaceful, quiet place to stay would of course improve patient outlooks and, in all likelihood, significantly reduce the overall cost of care.
Mr. Brown is a beneficiary of a movement by health care providers to use federal housing and tax programs to prescribe housing along with medications to treat ailments. Some hospitals have created housing units that act as real estate developers — buying, renovating and renting buildings to patients. Other hospitals and health care providers have brokered deals with local housing authorities to obtain housing vouchers for their patients.
It makes perfect sense. Whether it be fighting drug addiction, suffering a pattern of strokes, or attempting to dodge your next asthma attack, living on the streets or in a community shelter would present untold complications that a good, decent room would remedy in short order.
Oh, but of course the only reason we're talking about it is because federal low-income housing programs are a prime target for Republican budget slashing. Just because a program like this—paying a few hundred dollars per month for a small one-room apartment, rather than having to load the patient up with even more prescriptions in an attempt to medicate their problems away—is quite obviously a fine way to cut medical costs doesn't mean it will survive the Republican need to slash government services in favor of the all-consuming edict that rich folks need to pay even less in taxes.
But that movement has a new worry: deep but unspecified cuts that President Trump has proposed for housing programs, including rental assistance; and a sweeping simplification of the tax code that could reduce targeted tax breaks like those aimed at developers of low-income housing, in order to lower tax rates broadly. [...]
“When you are trying to rewrite a tax code that raises more than $40 trillion, every penny counts,” said Sage Eastman, a tax lobbyist who spent years on tax overhaul plans at the House Ways and Means Committee. “And there are a lot of pennies in the low-income tax credit program.”
It's a good read, and a good reminder that treating people decently is often, for government and private business alike, far cheaper than ignoring problems until they've gotten worse.