Two stories today, the second explores some musings on health care versus social services per se and moots SIBs while we lead with Salt Lake County expanding their approach in Utah for more PFS deployment. Happy reading:
Salt Lake County Exploring 3 More ‘Pay For Success’ Issues
Mike Gorrell – Salt lake Tribune
Salt Lake County has picked three more issues of social concern as potential areas to use the “Pay For Success” model to produce better results at lower long-term costs for taxpayers.
The County Council on Tuesday authorized Mayor Ben McAdams, along with a University of Utah “innovation laboratory,” to spend the next few months putting programs together to deal with:
• Maternal/child health;
• The criminal justice system, particularly the idea of keeping inmates from returning to jail after being released; and
• Homelessness.
In all three areas, said former McAdams adviser Jeremy Keele, “there is an opportunity to avoid some really bad outcomes that really drag society down and a chance to do it in a cost-effective way if we intervene early in the process.”
Social Impact Bonds To Address Social Determinants Of Health
The Incidental Economist – Austin Frakt
There’s more to health than health care. Estimates vary, but social determinants and environmental factors play a substantial role.
Relative to other countries with better health outcomes, we spend a much higher proportion on health care than on other social services. This might explain why our health outcomes are so much worse (Taylor, Bradley). Our spending is not allocatively efficient.
If this is indeed the key, the straightforward thing to do would be to reallocate spending from health care to other social services.
This may be politically hard. [Why? Need to get to the notion that people are skeptical of the benefits of social services spending or otherwise unwilling to fund, if true.]
Another approach, perhaps more politically viable, are social impact bonds. Examples in a 2014 Health Affairs paper.