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The homeless will always be with us. No one wants to hire them, and there's no way society can afford to just give them a place to live. When a dude is sleeping in a box he found in the alleyway and eating rats cooked over a cigarette lighter, it's sad, but he's not costing us anything -- at most, he costs whatever spare change he collects in his hat every day.
But has anyone gone ahead and calculated the actual cost of keeping someone alive and homeless? Someone did! And it's around a million dollars.
"This city is my mansion, and you're all terribly ungrateful butlers."
Wait, What?
First of all, as a society we're not cool with just letting poor people die in the streets. So while we don't provide housing, we do provide emergency room care. It's counterintuitive, but this begrudging little bit of help actually winds up costing society way more than if we just went the whole way.
Why? Well, it should come as a surprise to nobody that living on the street is kind of unhealthy, and that's before the depression and its accompanying substance abuse come into play. For example, Boston Health Care for the Homeless tracked 119 chronically homeless people for five years. In that time, those 119 people racked up an astounding 18,834 emergency room visits, despite the fact that 33 of them died and seven were placed in a nursing home during that time. In Washington in 2002, 198 individuals generated 9,000 emergency room visits, or a little under one a week. At a minimum of $1,000 a visit, that's a heck of a medical bill that those hospitals are trying to collect from a homeless person. Unless they have a really good day panhandling, that money is coming out of your pocket.
"You mean this won't cover my co-pay?"
Add in the annual cost of $24,000 if they take advantage of a shelter, plus the cost of the police to arrest and process those who misbehave (plus the round-the-clock housing, feeding and guarding they get once they're in jail), and it all adds up to a tidy sum for taxpayers to handle. Experts say it really would be cheaper just to house them and treat them.
For instance, a San Diego program found that "When patients were connected with housing, income benefits, health insurance and a primary care home, a 61 percent decrease in emergency department visits and a 62 percent decrease in inpatient days occurred over two years." Statistically, a person just doesn't get as sick, and doesn't get into as much trouble, once they have a roof over their head.
"... and no more lighter rats for me. It's strictly propane rats from now on."
The general public, of course, would never go for this idea, on principle alone. But it turns out principle is expensive as hell. And if you automatically rebel against the idea of giving free houses to hobos, you're going to hate this next one even more ..
