> when it makes both ethical and financial sense.
It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.
It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I make no claims about how common this kind of fraud would actually be.