It benefits everyone to house the homeless
Though many people are against providing free services to the homeless because they see them as an undeserved and unearned handout, the problems of the homeless don’t only effect the homeless. When a homeless person has to use the emergency room for medical care the cost of their visit is passed on to tax payers. The dangers of living on the streets with inadequate food and in all types of weather also mean that homeless people frequently visit the emergency room. They also show up with severs problems because they rarely get preventative care. Not helping the homeless actually can financially hurt a community.
A new post by the From Poverty To Opportunity Campaign outlines the findings from a new study by the Aids Foundation of Chicago that shows, again, that providing housing and intensive case management to the homeless drastically reduces their use of emergency rooms and therefore their financial cost to the community.
The Campaign quotes the study as saying:
Remarkably, homeless people who were housed were admitted to the hospital one-third fewer times than people in the control group. They also spent one-third fewer days in the hospital and went to the emergency room one-fourth fewer times.
For every 100 homeless adults offered the program intervention, there would be 49 fewer hospitalizations, 273 less days spent in the hospital, and 116 fewer emergency department visits.
Back in April I wrote about two similar studies from the Heartland Alliance Mid-America Institute on Poverty and the Journal of the American Medical Association that found the same community benefits to housing the homeless.
Every politician has spent the summer talking about the high costs of health care in America and there are many proposals to help lower those costs. One way is to reduce the number of emergency room visits by homeless people because those visits are paid for by those who have insurance. Multiple studies by different organizations all around the country have shown that providing housing and intensive case management can reduce the burden that the homeless impose on the health care system while drastically improving the health of the homeless.
Related posts:
- Studies show helping the homeless helps taxpayers Two recent studies suggest that housing services for the homeless...
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