3 ms·

> when it makes both ethical and financial sense. It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.

wonderzombie 14y ago
On the other hand, you have to ask whether the cost of trying to make sure not a single dollar is given to the undeserving outweighs both the monetary savings and benefits to society overall. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I envision this to be a lot like crime. You'll never get rid of it completely, so you put into place some (ostensibly) cost-effective measures to mitigate the worst of it.
- wooter 14y ago
  > On the other hand, you have to ask whether the cost of trying to make sure not a single dollar is given to the undeserving outweighs both the monetary savings and benefits to society overall. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. based on no data, what-so-ever? I believe the parent claiming that there would be no monetary savings at-scale or in the long term
  - wonderzombie 14y ago
    And you believe that, based on no data what-so-ever? ;) Right now, we spend a lot of money and get very little. If we chose to spend more rather than passively leak money, we'd at least be able to exercise some control over how it's spent, benefit from economies of scale, and so on. To be explicit, I'm drawing a distinction between efficiency of dollars and raw quantity of dollars. Given the choice between spending $250 and getting nothing versus spending $500 and receiving something of substantial value, I'd opt for the latter. And that's what the qualifier about "benefits to society overall" is about; there's more value to be had from this than some dollar amount. But if all we're thinking about is a) how many dollars it costs (and not how we're wasting money now), and b) that some small subset of people might game the system (which will always happen, regardless of counter-measures), I think that's self-defeating.
fusiongyro 14y ago
The article I'm remembering actually addressed that. The program was limited to a very small number of people--tens, or fewer. They actually had one that wrecked his apartment every week, and still it was cheaper to fix it back up than to let this guy back on the street, where he would incur about $1M a year in ER bills. One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited. You would think that this kind of operation would get cheaper at scale. You might not need 2X wrecked-apartment-repairmen for 2X people housed.
- philh 14y ago
  The fraud that jumps to my mind is a hypothetical person taking a free apartment, when they are perfectly capable of supporting themselves and would do so if the alternative was homelessness. That's certainly not cheaper. I make no claims about how common this kind of fraud would actually be.
potatolicious 14y ago
This argument irks me. Have you been on the inside of a homeless shelter? The constant bed bug invasions, bunking right next to a paranoid schizophrenic, living in constant fear of rape (yes, even for men)? Treated like a social pariah on a good day, non-existent the next? This isn't even the tip of the iceberg, I assure you. Life inside the system is not nearly as rosy as you might think. Often I feel like people should be made to work directly with the homeless before letting them spout off on this particular topic.
- ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
  Nothing in the GP post says anything about the rosiness of life inside the system.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    Your post suggested that the system wouldn't scale due to fraud - the implication being that people would take advantage of the free housing being provided. What I said was that the conditions in these institutions is so inhumanly bad, that no one in their right mind would voluntarily do it. So what kind of fraud are you thinking of?
    - dasil003 14y ago
      People running shelters taking advantage of government funding perhaps? Still seems the money is too little to make much profit through fraud, but there's no shortage of bottom-feeding hustlers and slumlords to try...
idm 14y ago
Banks combat fraud by investing in fraud prevention. They make it work because the margins are greater than the expense of the fraud prevention. Without calculating the expense spread between the criminal justice system and the mental health system, I'd wager that the savings will be great enough that we can afford fraud prevention too.

wonderzombie 14y ago

On the other hand, you have to ask whether the cost of trying to make sure not a single dollar is given to the undeserving outweighs both the monetary savings and benefits to society overall. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I envision this to be a lot like crime. You'll never get rid of it completely, so you put into place some (ostensibly) cost-effective measures to mitigate the worst of it.

wooter 14y ago
> On the other hand, you have to ask whether the cost of trying to make sure not a single dollar is given to the undeserving outweighs both the monetary savings and benefits to society overall. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. based on no data, what-so-ever? I believe the parent claiming that there would be no monetary savings at-scale or in the long term
- wonderzombie 14y ago
  And you believe that, based on no data what-so-ever? ;) Right now, we spend a lot of money and get very little. If we chose to spend more rather than passively leak money, we'd at least be able to exercise some control over how it's spent, benefit from economies of scale, and so on. To be explicit, I'm drawing a distinction between efficiency of dollars and raw quantity of dollars. Given the choice between spending $250 and getting nothing versus spending $500 and receiving something of substantial value, I'd opt for the latter. And that's what the qualifier about "benefits to society overall" is about; there's more value to be had from this than some dollar amount. But if all we're thinking about is a) how many dollars it costs (and not how we're wasting money now), and b) that some small subset of people might game the system (which will always happen, regardless of counter-measures), I think that's self-defeating.

fusiongyro 14y ago

The article I'm remembering actually addressed that. The program was limited to a very small number of people--tens, or fewer. They actually had one that wrecked his apartment every week, and still it was cheaper to fix it back up than to let this guy back on the street, where he would incur about $1M a year in ER bills. One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited.

MartinCron 14y ago
One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited. You would think that this kind of operation would get cheaper at scale. You might not need 2X wrecked-apartment-repairmen for 2X people housed.
philh 14y ago
The fraud that jumps to my mind is a hypothetical person taking a free apartment, when they are perfectly capable of supporting themselves and would do so if the alternative was homelessness. That's certainly not cheaper. I make no claims about how common this kind of fraud would actually be.

potatolicious 14y ago

This argument irks me. Have you been on the inside of a homeless shelter? The constant bed bug invasions, bunking right next to a paranoid schizophrenic, living in constant fear of rape (yes, even for men)? Treated like a social pariah on a good day, non-existent the next? This isn't even the tip of the iceberg, I assure you. Life inside the system is not nearly as rosy as you might think. Often I feel like people should be made to work directly with the homeless before letting them spout off on this particular topic.

ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
Nothing in the GP post says anything about the rosiness of life inside the system.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Your post suggested that the system wouldn't scale due to fraud - the implication being that people would take advantage of the free housing being provided. What I said was that the conditions in these institutions is so inhumanly bad, that no one in their right mind would voluntarily do it. So what kind of fraud are you thinking of?
  - dasil003 14y ago
    People running shelters taking advantage of government funding perhaps? Still seems the money is too little to make much profit through fraud, but there's no shortage of bottom-feeding hustlers and slumlords to try...

idm 14y ago

Banks combat fraud by investing in fraud prevention. They make it work because the margins are greater than the expense of the fraud prevention. Without calculating the expense spread between the criminal justice system and the mental health system, I'd wager that the savings will be great enough that we can afford fraud prevention too.