Opinion

What the genie told me

If I woke up as chief of policy, here is my plan of action

When the new Chief of Policy accidently dropped an old lamp in his new office, a genie appeared, and gave an insightful answer to solve the city's problems.

By Peter Simon
Posted 12/15/14
More than a dream, Green and Healthy Housing is a practical way to solve many of Providence’s pressing financial problems.
Which member of the Mayor-elect Jorge Elorza’s transition team and new administration will wake up and call Peter Simon to talk about how to turn his dream into a working reality?
Asthma is the leading health cause of school absenteeism. It is also one of the leading causes of higher medical costs and expensive emergency room visits. Decreasing the known triggers of asthma by investing in green and healthy homes is a proven, cost-effective way to increase school achievement and economic attainment – and improve neighborhoods.

PROVIDENCE – I had a dream the other night. As usual, not every part was retained by my aging brain’s memory bank, but here is what I can recall.

I was the newly announced Chief of Policy for an incoming executive in charge of a municipal government of a city with about 200,000 people, with only 175,000 known to the state and federal government as legal residents.

There were critical local services without adequate financing, pensions were under-funded, union workers without contracts, and not a lot of happy campers.

The Boss had made a commitment to rebuild our economic base, invest in schools, housing and public safety. He suggested that one way to get the financial ship on the right course was to attract city employees to move back to the city, lower their health care costs and raise revenue as neighborhoods became more economically diverse.

So, where is the dream part, you ask? The above sounds like a nightmare.

If one wish could be granted
Anyway, as Chief of Policy, my job was to figure out a way we could accomplish the goals set out by the mayor-elect.

As I was packing my office to move into City Hall, I came across an old lamp that had been tucked away in a corner closet. As I placed it in a box, it slipped out of my hands and it fell to the floor.

Almost immediately, a genie appeared asking me for my one wish.

So, genie, tell me the way to accomplish what the Boss says we need in our city?

The genie was silent.

Finally, I said, genie, here is my one wish: I need a policy that would bring city employees back to town, increase the property tax income through these moves, create an economically diverse neighborhood out of ones with concentrated poverty and abandoned property, and, at the same time, reduce their health care expenditures.

The Genie, at first, was locked in pensive paralysis, then she shifted into high gear. She turned around three times and faced me, saying: “Green and Healthy Housing needs to be added to contractual employee health benefits. The full cost would be borne by the city, but only for families of city workers who live in the city and commit to stay for five years.”

The genie continued: this new health benefit’s costs for other workers would be shared between the city and worker in a stepped manner depending on the families’ asthma-related, injury and mental health services costs over the previous three years in a manner to be agreed on mutually.

Half of the savings accrued to the employee health benefits would be paid into the pension plan.

I was blown away. Could this really work? Or is it only a dream?

Editor’s note: A new Request for Proposals has been issued by the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative for a Pay For Success project funded with social impact bonds, focused on asthma-prevention initiatives.

The national program seeks to replicate a project being developed in Baltimore, Maryland, between the Calvert Foundation, Johns Hopkins HealthCare and the Johns Hopkins Health System, in partnership with Green & Healthy Homes.

Under this program, private investors participating in the Pay For Success project fund the upfront costs for providing social services. The investors are then repaid if the program achieves the agreed-upon outcomes, such as decreased health care expenditures for treating asthma.

Under the new guidelines for the new initiative, after five health care organizations are selected as awardees, a second Request for Proposals will be released to home-based service providers in the selected health care entities’ areas. One service provide in each location will be selected. [See link below for more information.]

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