Homeless people receive inadequate attention from the public and care facilities due to the overall attitude of neutrality, a trend that results in them receiving inadequate assistance on the social and medical fronts.
The general population and authorities consistently ignore the issues of homeless people, and the approaches to solving them typically lack insight. According to Gent (2017), people tend to dehumanize the people they see on the streets and respond to them as they would to objects, attempting to view them neutrally and seeing their need for help as selfish and greedy. Tsai, Jenkins, and Lawton (2017) claim that despite the tendency for homeless shelter populations to have civil legal issues, only half of the facilities screens their inhabitants for such, and only a tenth have a medical-legal partnership. Zlotnick, Zerger, and Wolfe (2013) call out the mainstream healthcare system’s view of specialized carers’ existence as a reason to disregard the issues of homeless people and highlight the Affordable Care Act as a potential solution.
Overall, it appears that the primary issue regarding the various aid programs for people without a permanent residence is the lack of comprehensive analysis and understanding. Any undertaking that would help homeless people significantly would also likely be highly expensive and require a massive nationwide effort. As such, the government prefers to keep the issue small and unpublicized, and the public does not understand the full extent of their problems. Meanwhile, homeless people remain disadvantaged in both legal and medical matters as their needs are not being addressed. Various institutions have to acknowledge the issues that affect the population and develop then implement integrated methods that address them.
References
Gent, W. (2017). When homelessness becomes a “luxury”: Neutrality as an obstacle to counterpublic rights claims. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 103(3), 230-250.
Tsai, T., Jenkins, D., & Lawton, E. (2017). Civil legal services and medical-legal partnerships needed by the homeless population: A national survey. The American Journal of Public Health, 107(3), 398-401.
Zlotnick, C., Zerger, S., & Wolfe, P. B. (2013). Health care for the homeless: What we have learned in the past 30 years and what’s next. The American Journal of Public Health, 103(S2), S199-S205.