A new, $30 million addiction treatment center is coming to Decatur, thanks to a gift from Warren Buffett's son Howard. Bram Sable Smith, a correspondent for Kaiser Health News, tells KMOX that Howard Buffett has roots in Macomb County where he worked as a sheriff.
"Well, when he was appointed interim Sheriff, one of the things he did was take tours of various of the social services available in Macomb County," Sable Smith said. "And one of the big resources, one of the big safety net resources in Macon County, Illinois is Crossing Healthcare."
Crossing Healthcare is a federally qualified clinic, meaning it mostly serves low-income, underinsured or uninsured patients, including many who are on Medicaid — regardless of their ability to pay. Seeing the work that Crossing was doing for the community, he thought there was a good opportunity to build an addiction treatment center.
Howard Buffett made a one-time gift of $30 million to build the facility, and left it up to the Crossing Healthcare team to find the money to run the program — which Sable Smith says was very intentional.
"If you talk to Howard Buffett about it, he says there's kind of two ideas behind it. One is, through his foundation, he doesn't want to keep funding the same things every year," he said. "The second part behind that, and this is kind of a really important piece of it, is that this is kind of a proof of concept. It was important for the addiction treatment center to run on funding that was already available through Medicaid, through other programs, grants, etc. that already exist."
That way, he explained, investors can show how a one-time investment can build something impactful in a community.
Hear more about the new addiction treatment center coming to Decatur:
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