He did talk about health stuff in relation to housing (the environment primarily) during the confirmation hearing, so, there's his healthcare professional prospective.
It's good that Carson is directly citing lead poisoning as a big issue.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.htmlFor those who had been exposed to lead as toddlers, even in small amounts, the scans revealed changes that were subtle, permanent and devastating. The toxic metal had robbed them of gray matter in the parts of the brain that enable people to pay attention, regulate emotions and control impulses. Lead also had scrambled the production of white matter that transmits signals between different parts of the brain, largely by mimicking calcium, an element that plays a critical role in brain development. Scars left by lead have had significant consequences for the study participants and their communities. As children, they struggled in school more than those who had not been exposed. As teens, they committed crimes more frequently, University of Cincinnati researchers reported.
Part of our limited reasoning is that we think about the individual effects of e.g. lead exposure, but we don't scale that up to think about what happens when you do an "experiment" where you exposed entire cities to the stuff. e.g. if an
individual commits more criminal behavior due to brain damage from lead exposure, then logically if
everyone has a high level of lead exposure,
you'd think that we could put 2 and 2 together and realize that the total crime rate will rise if we do that. Except we've
known about the effects of lead exposure on the brain for longer than any bay12er has been alive, and yet people only started talking about a connection to mass public behavior less than 1 decade ago. It's like humans have a blind spot in realizing that individual effects
scale up when there are more people.
“HUD has several different ways it helps people, through [ensuring] financing for that first home to helping those in poverty, which has been an intractable problem for decades.”
But you know who also used government money to create incentivized loans for poor people because having a home was supposed to pull you out of poverty? GW Bush's policies related to HUD / FNMA, and his "American Dream Downpayment Act" which was supposed to fix poverty by giving all the poor people a housing asset and a mortgage. We saw what that lead to already. Have they got a better policy? One that doesn't involve giving massively risky expendable minimum-wage workers a huge loan?