Seeing the New York Times article on the Green House among the top three most-emailed articles today gave me a little more hope for the future. And this bit got me thinking:
“It would increase long-term costs if it were implemented to replace every nursing home in the country,” said Dr. Catherine Hawes, director of the program on aging and long-term care policy at Texas A&M Health Science Center.
Can somebody actually run the numbers to explore that assertion more? What would the long-term costs be? How many costly hospitalizations would be prevented over the course of 75 years if we replaced every institutional nursing home (15,000+) with households over the next few years? And how many good jobs would such an audacious works project generate (for those who work in the new households, and the construction jobs created in the short-term)?