Can Hospitals Help Solve Homelessness?

The Santa Monica Daily Press recently published an article about how hospitals can help with our homeless crisis. (See page 6 of this article.) The concept is simple:

Help hospitals assess how much they are spending each year on un-paid emergency room visits by the region’s homeless population, and the hospitals might be willing to help pay for preventative homeless services.

Clearly, people living on the streets do not have health insurance, and are more susceptible to getting sick. Hospitals cannot just kick people out of their facilities because they are poor, so many times they have to foot the bill.

The unknown in this simple logic is whether hospital executives would truly believe that donating money for homeless services would really reduce the homeless population enough that homeless people would no longer resort to entering their emergency rooms.

It will be interesting to see how hospitals respond…