Interesting thought. I don't have an immediate response other than to say that just because we have free shelters it doesn't mean it's a *solution* for the homeless. It deals with the consequences, but it doesn't fix the problem.
I don't have the metrics or background on enough of the free clinics to know if it's a suitable response or not.
And the problem which causes homelessness is...? Laziness? Disability? You can't "solve" this "problem". Yes, sometimes people fall on hard times, but we are only guaranteed the
pursuit of hapiness, not hapiness itself. People are free to get jobs and provide themselves with a home. Or they're free to live in a van down by the river. I don't see that this is a problem which needs solving. Shelters and free clinics make sure that the homeless and less well off have a place to go for food and basic medical care. If they want more, they can get more. But, this is an opinion of sociology and humanity most would crucify me for, so we'll let it go.
But yes, to answer your question, we do have COBRA. That satisfies part of the battle in that those unemployed can still remain insured, but now we're back at the affordability problem again and people go off it. Back to square one.
So why do we not actually attack the problem and work to bring health care costs back into a range where insurance isn't required for preventative care? They were this way not too long ago. Yes, COBRA is there, and yes, it's expensive...but I'd wager that the root of the problem is the need for insurance in the first place.
Medical insurance should be like life insurance...you don't need insurance to live, but it kind of helps when you die.
There are three apsects of medical costs that need to be addressed, and from what I've seen, no one is actually interested in addressing them:
1) Malpractice litigation. Yes, it's not THE most expensive portion, but it needs to be addressed. There was a story on the nightly local news here a couple months ago about an Army private who needed his appendix out. They accidentally severed an artery and he lost a limb because if it. The "phone-in" portion was thick with people calling for him to sue the government. Medicine isn't, and never has been, an exact science. Mistakes happen, and engaging in any medical treatment implies that you understand the risks.
2) Pharmaceuticals. This kind of ties in with the above...there's way too much CYA involved with selling pharmaceuticals in the US, and the 7-year exclucivity of medicine isn't right either. Well, it's needed because of all the CYA needed to avoid frivolous lawsuits, but still. The Pharmaceutical industry in the US is almost as bad as the textbook publishing business as far as being a racket goes.
3) Dictated pricing for medical procedures. It used to be that the patient and doctor could agree on a mutually acceptable price for whatever service was required. With Medicare and Medicaid, however, came a list of "maximum payouts" for various services. What did this do? It caused doctors to always charge that maximum price. Additional regulation, such as the maximum payout per day for Medicare combined with the requirement that doctors cannot refuse Medicare patients, made it so that doctors were not always paid for services, meaning they had to raise the price of private individuals to cover the losses from the others.
Address these three issues, and medical insurance will cease to be required for simple doctor visits.
It's not a question of rights. It's a question of who we are as a country. I think that is another part of the argument that gets missed. People point and say "that's not a right!", but if all we have to rest on are our rights then we don't have much. It's those fundamental rights that give rise to success, but there is a hell of a lot in between! Without panspermia we have no us (if you believe in that sort of thing), but pointing back to panspermia all the time doesn't do us much good.
We have the right to seek better our stations in life. That's the only right we need. We have the right to seek out better living conditions for ourselves at our own cost. We have the right to find better employment. We have the right to purchase those things which we would like and to have luxuries. This is all we need.
Socialism (yes, that's where we're headed) flies in direct contention with that right. Redistribution of wealth is directly contrary to the "pursuit of happiness". Taking what's mine and giving it to someone else does nothing but lower the average standard of living and makes it that much harder to pursue better living conditions. THIS is the biggest problem we face right now. War, homelessness, poverty be damned. The departure from, arguably, the greatest legacy we were given (the right to help ourselves) will change this country for the worse and will effectively be the last nail in the cross upon which our leaders have crucified our most important governing document.
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