Healthy Investments: Leveraging Health Plan Capital for Affordable Housing and Community Development
Increasingly, the health care system has turned its attention to addressing the non-medical drivers of health such as food security, transportation and healthy affordable housing. While many hospitals are beginning to invest in social determinants of health, fewer health plans have done so.
This issue brief, a part of Community Catalyst’s Social Investment Initiative, aims to unlock health plan resources that can be invested in increasing the availability of safe and affordable housing and community development. In the brief, made possible with support from the Kresge Foundation, we lay out the case for health plans making these kinds of investments.
Topics covered in this brief:
- Background on the regulatory and financial landscape influencing plans’ ability to make social investments
- Analysis of the feasibility of health plan investments into housing and community development
- A set of investment options for health plans
- Examples of three health plans that have committed significant resources to housing and community development projects