SPIRITUALITY, FAIR TRADE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
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15	October 2013

Dollars, Sense and Dignity (Treseler)

Stand out parts
1) First, the comment he makes about saving medicaid $18,000 a person through his program. He claims, and research suggests, that $18k is saved by medicaid due to elderly not going into medicaid funded operations or homes that require medicaid funding.
2) The second stand out area is that of dealing and working through failure and delinal. He says he was never a person to be afraid if rejection or failure and that is what helped him succeed.
Responses
1) I have an optimist and pessimist view on the first comment. The optimist in me says that this is great, and that this operation is a great way to show a private person finding a way to make the government fun more efficiently. We see that he groups some funding together and over all the systems save, so he claims. And that is where the pessimist in me comes out. The article says that Medicaid saves $18,000/ person. My question is does another agency HHS or HUD bare a higher cost due to this program. I would imagine that if people who need the housing are getting funding, then there is an increased cost to HUD. So for this to economically work, as he suggest, HUD would have to be paying less than Medicaid is saving for the whole system to be saved.
2) This comment on failure and not giving up really was something great to hear from someone who did something so great for the community. He did something that we can all recognize now but we did see the lost battles for 8 years with HHS and HUD and local medicaid systems or even local governments. These hard fought battles are ones that led to this outcome of an ecosystem sustaining itself. But he could have given up on this at any time because the fights were to difficult, but this really shows that hard work can pay off and honored.