Rachel Streiff

And so we can have individuals living in assisted living facilities and programs that are supervised and provide around the clock care.

But we've excluded the SMI population from that.

So instead, we're doing it very expensively in two week stays.

It's a variety of private hospitals.

Ask anyone who works in these private psychiatric facilities.

At any point in time, a third to one half of the patients in those facilities are friendly faces, revolving door individuals that we are essentially housing in hospitals.

States look the other way because hospitals

Medicaid dollars are funding this and the housing cost, the assisted living cost that the states have to pay because of the IMD exclusion.

They're avoiding investing in that because we can just keep people on these two week funneling of cash into our state.

So if we took that money and we applied it to supervised housing and long-term care and assisted living, you would get so much more for your money.

So this is not a lack of available funds.

It's siloed.

I mean, if we turned our jails into good treatment facilities, if we created secure residential programs like we do have for Alzheimer's,

If we invested in some decent real estate and workforce development, we could get early intervention.

We could prevent comorbidities.

We could prevent deterioration.

And we could stop these individuals from not just deteriorating and becoming increasing burden on the system.

But I've seen recovery to where individuals are no longer disabled and are even productive taxpaying individuals.

So there's ways to do this.

We're just not doing it.