OKLAHOMA CITY: A major shift to more voucher-type funding of social services, including health and education, is proposed in a new official report.
The report on “more effective social services” says the government should “empower clients” by handing over budgets for people to spend on choosing their own education, healthcare and social services.
It also recommends much more decentralized services, including possible competing insurance-based systems.
But decentralization would be matched by more data-sharing between agencies to track how individuals are doing, and extending the “investment approach” from its current use in welfare spending to guide up-front spending across other areas such as education and healthcare to reduce future costs to the health, welfare and justice systems.
The report proposes a new centralized Office for Social Services to coordinate data-sharing and extending the investment approach…