What does it take to end homelessness? Just what Governor Malloy is proposing: invest in supportive housing and increase the supply of affordable housing.
I am one of the many people at the Greater New Haven Regional Alliance to End Homelessness table discussing how we can achieve the region's goals of ending homelessness among chronic individuals and veterans in the next four years, and for all people over the next ten years. There are great efforts underway to better coordinate and utilize our existing resources. Many providers in Greater New Haven are moving quickly to rework how they deliver services to respond to the unparalleled demands they are facing, while they recommit to meeting these tight timeframes to end homelessness.
Tax season doesn't typically conjure happy thoughts. But if you are a lower-income family (a household earning less than $50,000 annually), tax time can mean receiving a significant boost to your income by capturing tax credits earned through work.
There's a supply-side versus demand-side battle raging in the nation's capital, which seems like old hat. The new twist is the debate is about how to get Americans back to work, and the disagreement is about the root cause of our unemployment woes.
It turns out that my random decisions are not so random, rather highly predictable and easily influenced. And I am not alone. Behavioral economics has unraveled a whole new world of understanding people's actions, and provided compelling evidence to break-down some of the stagnant or ineffective structures/policies/ideologies that have persisted for so long.
I’m feeling pinched in the data divide. Or maybe adrift. I’m not sure if the malady is too much data or too little data or not the right data. Mostly, I think the challenge is not having the time and skills to make the most of the data that is available. And what is available is very impressive. Workforce Alliance, our region’s lead entity to connect people with employment, has made available the data and analysis they receive from Monster on labor market trends in South Central CT.
How does our community address homelessness in a way that meets the needs of homeless people and everyone in the community?
Springfield, Massachusetts answered this question and had astounding results: the city went from having 100 homeless people living on the streets to 5 just a few years later. Geraldine McCafferty, Springfield's housing director, told the story of the city's efforts at an IForum this morning at the Lyceum in Hartford hosted by the Partnership for Strong Communities.
Asking the poorest people in our state to pay for prescriptions doesn't work. We know this in CT from first-hand experience. We know it from the research that has been done in the field. But Governor Malloy's current budget includes Medicaid recipients paying co-pays for prescriptions and doctors' appointments. $1.50 seems like an impossibly small amount of money to ask someone to pay for a prescription, and for most of us it seems hard to believe that this is either an unreasonable policy or a barrier to care.
And in health care, three years ago the CT legislature asked HUSKY (Connecticut's Medicaid program to provide health care coverage to low-income children and adults) to pilot a program called Primary Care Case Management (PCCM) that has demonstrated significant cost savings in other parts of the county. The idea is simple: remove private insurance companies and instead people on HUSKY covered by PCCM receive care coordination through their primary care physicians. The state pays providers $7.50/month to cover the cost of coordinating care, and patients get the benefit of working closely with their doctors and not facing limits on care based on health insurance providers trying to manage their costs.
