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US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007
- Baldbvrhunter 3y ago[flagged]
- mupuff1234 3y agoAre illegal immigrants being counted in the homeless population? I would assume not.
- Baldbvrhunter 3y agoThey are sleeping somewhere, some will be displacing citizens
- apwell23 3y agoYes because they don't ask for immigration status when they do the count. Any reason for assumption that they are asking for immigration status ? I do see a lot of migrants here sleeping outside in the parks.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoYes, why wouldn't they? If someone is homeless, they are home less.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoThere is evidence all around us that things aren’t as rosy as some politicians and media talking heads would have you believe. The opposite can also be true of course. That things aren’t as dire as opposition personalities would have you believe.
- 1-6 3y agoSo what's the point of this comment then?
- sigmoid10 3y agoThat HN comments don't always have a point. On the other hand, that observation is also a point in and of itself.
- beernet 3y agoMeh, too many obviously LLM generated comments...
- unnamed76ri 3y agoJust highlighting that we are constantly being fed propaganda for those that may not yet be aware.
- feedforward 3y agoHave been following this a little and two things seem to be true: Looking at the economic numbers, a lot of things look good, or at least, they are not so bad. Multiple polls asking people how the economy is doing show they think it is doing worse. Generally Biden supporters push the first point, and Biden detractors push the second. Some of the Biden detractors are Biden voters who want different economic initiatives. One point is during Covid people got stimulus checks and evictions and student loan payments were frozen. Also interest rates were near zero, FAANGs were hiring like crazy etc. Now people were hit by inflation and interest rates have shot up. FAANGs haven been laying off, and to some extent Fortune 500 - or at least hiring is frozen. And so on.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway167 3y ago[flagged]
- no_wizard 3y agoIt says in the article that its 653,000, not 40 million. Not really sure where you are getting that figure, however it appears that the actual number is under a million people
- wenebego 3y agoThey used 331.9 million * .12 not realizing it was a rate of change rather than a percentage of the population
- gruez 3y ago"US homelessness up 12% from 2022" =/= "40% of americans are homeless" Also, the first sentence of the article literally says >653,000 people in the USA were homeless at the beginning of 2023
- rocky_raccoon 3y agoI'm staring at the 653,000 figure and still can't determine if I'm shocked because it seems surprisingly low or high. Perhaps it's because the previous poster dropped a 40 million number that moved my frame of reference. To put it into perspective for myself, 653,000 is larger than the following cities, based on 2022 estimates: - Boston - Portland - Louisville - Memphis - Detroit - Baltimore
- hathym 3y ago"Homelessness up 12%? Maybe we shipped our housing budget overseas by mistake.
- hiddencost 3y agoBad take.
- typeofhuman 3y agoIt's unbelievable how much we've sent Ukraine while Americans are suffering at dire rates. If we had hundreds of billions just laying around for crooked foreign nations, surely we had it for school lunch programs, affordable housing, homeless programs, etc.
- PoignardAzur 3y agoHow much was sent to Ukraine in cash, exactly? And how much of that was taken away from housing budgets? From what I heard, the vast majority of what was sent to Ukraine was military surplus. (That's of course ignoring some pretty serious points you're making more or less implicitly, eg that Americans are suffering in a way comparable to "being shelled by Russians" or that the help is send to encourage their "being crooked" and not, you know, fight back against invading Russians. And you're also basically brushing off the part where the help came in with strings attached in terms of fighting corruption.)
- apwell23 3y ago> military surplus. curious what happens to this if there are no proxy wars to sponser?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- esarbe 3y agoUkraine is not a proxy war. Ukraine is being attacked by Russia. Ukraine fights for its survival. It has been doing that since 2014, when Russia first attacked Ukraine. It has been doing that without help by the US for 8 years. It will continue to do so, with or without US help.
- vaxman 3y agoLandlords will soon strong-arm their tenants into granting "permission based access" to their personal financial accounts to fintech firms like FunnelLeasing (that, in turn, use services like Finicity.com) to monitor their tenants IN REAL TIME from the moment of application, throughout the entire lease period, and at every renewal, with AI models making decisions about how to rate the relationship on a level never before possible. It will literally be possible for the landlords to know which of their tenants are insolvent before many of those tenants know! (An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition.) In practical terms, it means that people just starting out (or starting again) are going to be heavily marginalized and wind up on the streets, group homes, etc. after one of life's many possible adverse events leads to the suspension of their income and depletion of their reserve funds (layoff; family medical issue; automobile accident, etc.) https://youtu.be/56u6g0POvo0 https://youtu.be/56u6g0POvo0
- brvsft 3y ago> An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition. The ability to evict someone before missing rent payments seems absurd. Are you saying this is an element of simple 'contract law' somehow, or that, often, boilerplate leases (contracts) specifically have clauses that allow eviction over insolvency without missing rent payments? I'm not sure what will happen in the future, but I would be surprised if an AI model estimating a person's insolvency would meet requirements of evidence. Maybe the AI knows the renter, say, used a payday lender twice in the last month and that has a 98% correlation with insolvency in the next three months (making up all these numbers, I have no idea, but it sounds almost believable). I would still be surprised if a judge allowed this to become evidence of insolvency. But of course it depends on the jurisdiction.
- 3y ago
- mattigames 3y agoWe should definitely give more money to Bezos, Musk and the like, I'm sure that will fix the problem.
- hathym 3y ago[flagged]
- esarbe 3y agoThis is a straw man argument. This is not a problem of lack of money. There's more than enough money to go around. This is a conscious decision to not provide money to the citizens in need and push it into the MIC instead.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- achenet 3y ago[flagged]
- jedilord 3y agoAnd Ukraine. Why wasn't that the first in your list. And this is the problem. Half the country thinks were doing just great under this "leadership".
- mattigames 3y agoYeah no, Bezos net worth alone is more than all the money the US goverment has given to Ukraine, and the money given to Ukraine and for financial and humanitary is a complex and subjetive issue because many believe it helps the US itself in the long term due helping mantain stability in Europe, some belive otherwise of course, its a complex issue for sure but nowhere similar to billionaires which are just citizens and money hoarders.
- cs702 3y agoThis is incredibly sad, and also very disappointing. Whatever we've been doing to solve the shortage of low-income housing in the US is not working. At all. We must try different approaches, even if they ruffle a lot of feathers.
- influx 3y agoIn Seattle, there’s lack of housing, but the bigger driver appears to be easy access to drugs like fentanyl and no consequences to anyone involved in using or selling them.
- hathym 3y ago[flagged]
- bombcar 3y agoship homeless instead?
- kridsdale1 3y agoRussia is already trying to ship all its “undesirables” over the Finn border as a soft form of warfare against Europe.
- jplasmeier 3y ago[flagged]
- jedilord 3y agoLove how facts are right-wing agitprop now. lol
- jplasmeier 3y agoFact is the recently elected City council made public drug use illegal: https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-passes-law-prosecute-drug-use-possession https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-p... Murdoch and co. will have you believe Seattle is a fentanyl-ridden wastleland. Property values say otherwise.
- r721 3y ago>blobstreaming.org Mostly posted by OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blobstreaming.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blobstreaming.org (16 out of 22 posts "by safaa1993")
- nerdponx 3y agoThe whole site seems to be a one-person news site, so I'm willing to bet that the HN user is probably the author.
- pkdpic 3y ago> The United States has more homeless people than ever since the country began measuring the size of the homeless population annually in 2007. Pretty important seeming, and a little surprising. So based on this wording the homeless population is higher than its ever been since we started recording it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dimva 3y agoIt makes sense that this is true. We've been systematically underbuilding housing since at least the 1980s. Lots of places had old, run-down surpluses that were being "revitalized", hiding the issue for decades. But now the housing shortage is being felt almost everywhere in the country. And yet, every year, we're still underbuilding relative to our population growth, thus making the problem worse. Unless our population starts to shrink like in Japan or Russia, we're either going to need to build A LOT of new housing or deal with an ever increasing population of homeless people. Even a slowly shrinking population is probably not enough to fix the problem, because rich people like to buy vacation homes, and we have a lot of rich people. We'd need rapid population decline, like what would happen from some catastrophe. I recommend building homes instead of that.
- bombcar 3y agoPopulation has also increased from 300 million to about 340 million, or more than 10%. Nothing else changing, we'd expect the number of homeless to be 10% larger than in 2007.
- confidantlake 3y agoIt is also important to note that the US population is higher than ever. My comment is being downvoted, could someone please let me know why I am wrong?
- neves 3y ago"653,000 people in the USA were homeless at the beginning of 2023" I'm always impressed with these statistics of world richest country.
- ModernMech 3y agoYou don’t get rich by spending money on homeless people, of course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LUmBULtERA 3y agoIt's not richest per capita though, it's 9th. Still wealthy, of course, but population matters.
- baby 3y agoRichest country because money is king, not people.
- happytoexplain 3y agoWe haven't found a system that is both good at creating wealth and also distributing it (for large, diverse societies).
- chung8123 3y agoThere is not a 100% one size fits all system. There are too many cultures and beliefs, and different people to think that one system is going to get 100% of the people. 0.2% isn't horrible. Could be better and with advancements hopefully we get better but we need to allocate our resources in priority and there are a lot of issues that are going to get priority above this issue.
- keybored 3y agoDon’t frame it as if we have been experimenting like dispassionate scientists. Wannabe socialist upstarts have been meddled with to stop the “contagion” and to benefit the corporations of whatever country (banana republics) instead of the natives.
- pierat 3y agoWhy should I care? Dealing with homelessness is a massive money suck with no real return (in the quarter). Homeless people arent making any money that goes into taxes... or businesses. Homeless people aren't stimulating the economy. Laws that apply equally to everyone (like not living on the streets) can be used to make them go elsewhere. I don't see why they matter at all. We all know "The Economy" is rich peoples' assets, and these people don't matter one bit. And, "The Economy" is doing GREAT! /I wish this was only sarcasm...
- spunker540 3y agoThank you for articulating why the problem is hard to solve. There is very little (financial) incentive to solve it, at all. It’s all cost with little upside. It’s not like new roads or new infrastructure which creates jobs in the short term and prosperity in the long term. At least it’s not currently billed that way. It’s medical bills and social workers and shelters that just prolong the existing problems.
- pierat 3y agoTo be fair, it behooves local governments to solve it. However, the moment a community does do something good, like UBI or small apartments, they get flooded with every other community exporting their homeless there. Same goes for states as well. Any state gets inundated, and quality of help goes down. And a national level plan has no traction. Capitalism itself implicates these people are just lazy and should help themselves. So there's no good (or any) national level plan. And the business part of the economy (rich people) just want them to be 'away'. The term "Greyhound therapy" is precisely that - rich people/local govts will buy you a ticket to go somewhere else. In the end, having these people with a home and stable living would ABSOLUTELY help local areas, and reduce massive burdens on services. But again, political will says these failures of the capitalist machine is somehow 100% their fault, and shouldn't be helped.
- Anon826 3y ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 3y agoTo me, a big part of the issue goes back to 2008 when Bush almost destroyed the economy and enabled Corporations to take over the Residential Housing Market (via low interest rates and foreclosure). Now these companies make people pay most of their income for rents, thus giving them the illusion the economy is bad. It is simple, people judge the economy on the amount of disposable income they have. Sadly the pols do not understand that. BTW, I noticed your '/s', but seems many people missed it.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoTrickle down has had some four decades to prove itself and, well, it just doesn't work. It's amazing there are people who still believe in it.
- tokai 3y agoSeen from the outside the US has an extremely harsh opinions on the homeless. I have often read of homeless people use of public libraries, as an argument against having public libraries at all. With a small social safety net, its weird to think that one can be without large amounts of homelessness.
- femiagbabiaka 3y agoAnecdote: the people I’ve met who feel most strongly about that are upper middle class and upwards non-religious folks, and mostly those living in or near cities. My parents brought me up serving at food kitchens and donating to the homeless even as the recessions of 200x were hitting our family. We weren’t alone in doing that.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago> upper middle class and upwards non-religious folks, and mostly those living in or near cities Well, you describe pretty much everyone I associate with, so I guess I can't counter your assertion. ;-)
- SauciestGNU 3y agoIn my anecdotal experience the religious folks are even harsher and more hostile toward the unhoused than secular people, but that's often because they run "programs" for unhoused people which require religious participation to receive aid, and I think they're chuffed people don't take advantage despite the religious coercion.
- baby 3y agoI disagree. Coming from Europe the problem is that the US is filled with homeless people everywhere. It really is a crisis. Whereas in Europe you don’t really see them. It’s incomparable (and yet we still complain about homeless people in Europe). For example I used to looooove hanging out at libraries, that’s until I moved to the US where they are crowded with homeless people.
- 3y ago
- papposilenus 3y agoThe article neglected to link to the actual report, which was the USA’s Department of Housing and Urban Development’s January 2023 Point-in-Time Count Report. Press release: https://www.usich.gov/news-events/news/hud-releases-january-2023-point-time-count-report https://www.usich.gov/news-events/news/hud-releases-january-... Report: https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HUD_No_23_278 https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoDiscussion last week Homelessness reaches highest reported level in the U.S. in 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663740
- r721 3y agoFrom the same OP even (and a better source article).
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoso it's a [dupe] then, what is going on here
- femiagbabiaka 3y agoWe are in the period following the end of COVID era relief, including, in many areas, eviction protection. Without diving into the politics of whether or not that relief was a good idea or not, this makes complete sense.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TradingPlaces 3y agoWe underbuilt housing for 30 years leading to the pandemic. This is the result of that. New housing units per new person. Dashed line at median. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cYTJ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cYTJ
- wombat-man 3y agoWe really need a nationwide push to fix this. This is just going to get worse and worse.
- konschubert 3y agoRemove zoning restrictions and community review processes and watch new construction shoot up.
- sandworm101 3y agoOr, take the non-liberation and crack down on the naked profiteering that is modern real estate. In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units being kept as investments and second/fourth homes. Anyone owning an empty house or apartment should be taxed whatever amount it necessary to encourage them into at least renting that place out and thereby expanding the pool of available living units in the market.
- returningfory2 3y agoIt doesn’t need to be either/or. We can simultaneously increase housing supply through new construction and disincentivize suboptimal uses of housing you describe.
- anthonypasq 3y agowhy does everyone fail to understand that the reason real estate is an "investment" is because prices are skyrocketing because supply is artificially constrained. If we just built properly real estate wouldnt be such a great investment. My parents happened to buy their house in an area that wasnt super desirable and continued to not be super desirable. If they had just invested their down payment in the S&P it would be worth twice what the house is. But as it is, investors seem convinced real estate is a great investment because governments refuse to let people build so prices continue to skyrocket. In Japan the value of a building reaches $0 after 30 years because they rebuild everything. A building is an inherently depreciating asset, yet my tenement in Boston build in the 1880's continues to go up in value because they cant build shit.
- booleanbetrayal 3y agoYet another side-effect of increased wealth inequality. You can call it a homelessness, housing, socioeconomic, or political crisis, but it's all a manifestation of one central problem. I worry this skew will only be further exacerbated by the asymmetric yields of ML-driven market capture, since we have no cohesive plans to smooth this transition in the United States.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoFentanyl is also responsible for a lot of this current cap, at least from my perspective in a big west coast city. It seems like all unhoused neighbors are on it, but of course that could just be selection bias (the ones you notice are having fent crises).
- ebiester 3y agoThere are a few things. The longer you are unhoused, the more that you are in a chronic state of danger. Opioids turn that stress response off for a moment and simultaneously make it harder to get out of the situation that caused the problem. The Opioid addicts don't care about being seen in a way that the invisible homeless do. The people whose mental health crises are exacerbated by being homeless are more likely to be visible because they have no reserves left. And Fentanyl is a good way to ignore that mental health crisis for a moment.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI get that. But that’s probably not all of the cases, maybe a few. A lot of them had a support network and simply burned their bridges with them via drug use, and now they are in the streets. But we should definitely prioritize helping the non drug addicted homeless population, get them off the streets as fast as possible, since once they get into fent, helping them is a magnitude harder! And that’s why we should prioritize sober housing. Yes, it’s sad, but once they get addicted to fent, they are probably not recovering from that, so let’s throw our resources at not letting that happen, rather than burning them on people that are very very hard to help.
- ebiester 3y agoIronically, getting the addicts off the street also helps, and the "housing" is more important than "sober." If you can get them stable, they may have a chance. The drug addiction happens because of the trauma in a vast majority of cases. Poor decisions may compound, but trauma causes rational decisions that also have the negative consequences that compound.
- ksherlock 3y agoThere is one class of homeless that we see - the mentally ill, drug addicted, drunk, whatever, sleeping on the street, shitting on the sidewalk. But there's also another class of homeless we don't see. They have jobs, they might be your coworker or classmate. But they live out of a car or at a homeless shelter. It's worth keeping that in mind.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThere is definitely a lot of van life/stealth campers going on here in Seattle, it isn’t hard to notice. But judging by their social media videos, is it fair to call them homeless? It seems like they chose that lifestyle rather than having it forced on them (or maybe it’s a mixture of both?). Van life is a huge difference from the RVs, who don’t really care about stealth, they just come in, deflate their tires, and call some curb+sidewalk their home, pile up random possessions on the sidewalk to make it impassable. This category is usually drug related, so not hard to notice. There is also the working poor who become homeless unrelated to drugs, who are living out of their cars. We really should prioritize those cases, which is easy enough to handle with just housing. They don’t need drug addiction treatment, they aren’t going to burn down the home you give them in a few weeks. But all our money is going to the former and not much is prioritized for the latter, which is a huge shame. I think we should hugely prioritize sober shelters and housing that have strict rules, it would really help the working homeless (none of them want to bunk with drug addicts for good reason, which also keeps them from getting help).
- wwtrv 3y ago> It seems like they chose that lifestyle By that definition me not living in a mansion overlooking the ocean is also a lifestyle choice. I doubt that many people in cities would live in vans if housing wasn't so unaffordable.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoAgain, check out the social media. If you decide to live in a van while working a $100k/year remote job, it’s a lifestyle choice.
- Dudical 3y agoMy local news coverage[1] of this story linked to the Federal data[2]. [1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/homeless/washington-rise-homelessness/281-2993299b-8b9f-474b-9b9c-73f011b85037 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/homeless/washington... [2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-AHAR-Part-1.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...
- habosa 3y ago650k out of 340M is an astonishing number. That's almost one in 500 people who don't have a place to call home in the richest country in the world. There were more than 500 people in my high school class ... Anything that affects 650k people has more than one cause, but we have mountains of evidence to show us the main cause: housing is too expensive. We don't build enough housing and the housing we do build is far too expensive. We then give homeowners and real estate developers so many tax breaks, loans, and other incentives such that America is completely addicted to housing-as-investment and the ever-rising price of a roof over one's head. It makes me ashamed to live here. It makes me ashamed to have a home of my own. If you're in the Bay Area and you want to help locally, I can personally recommend Larkin Street Youth Services as an excellent organization: https://larkinstreetyouth.org/ https://larkinstreetyouth.org/
- medvezhenok 3y agoOn the contrary, the prevalence of mental illness and other issues in the population is much higher than 1 in 500 (probably 10x that rate, at least), so while you think this number is high, I don't think it's crazy at all. Many of these people would probably have been forcibly institutionalized in the past (which some people think is better, and others think is worse). If we forcibly institutionalized the homeless, we would have zero homelessness overnight (but would that necessarily be better?). So judging simply from the numbers can be misleading. However, the trend of homelessness going up 12% year over year is a real issue, though the proper comparison point would probably be 2019 since there has been a lot of government intervention to artificially lower homelessness over the past couple of years (which might be long-term unsustainable given the budget deficits).
- habosa 3y agoI think you’re making two assumptions that I doubt. 1) That people with mental illness cannot keep themselves housed assuming housing is available and affordable. 2) That the seemingly high prevalence of mental illness is a cause of homelessness, rather than a symptom. I don’t think either of those is entirely true.
- keybored 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 3y agoIn addition to an insufficient stock of housing, people really struggle with the down payment on a home. It would make a huge difference if the federal government had an accessible program that gave lower/low-mid income people guaranteed loans at a subsidized rate (maybe a gradual phase out up to a family income of 150k?).
- poisonborz 3y agoI've seen this in some countries. Any subidies are sucked up by the construction industry and built into the prices, already when announcing such a program.
- marojejian 3y agoEzra Klein's podcast has a good summary of the recent report: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show-1/what-we-learned-from-the-deepest-look-at-homelessn/ https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show-1/what-we...
- kylehotchkiss 3y agohttps://www.pbssocal.org/shows/democracy-now/clip/cities-give-thousands-of-homeless-people-one-way-bus-tickets-to-leave-town https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/democracy-now/clip/cities-giv... It really bothers me that quite a few cities want to address homelessness by shipping them to California on taxpayer dollars and then California is given a hard time for not housing them all. California really needs to be building a database and only serving Californias who have become homeless and helping get the others back to their home states. There is no moral obligation to give somebody who took a bus from Oklahoma for free a home in some of the most expensive cities in the country. Do people realize how difficult it is for normal person to move across the USA? I did it before, it was expensive and a difficult move. Housing is a problem and it’s sad that moving cross country will continue to become less and less accessible to people who could provide California economy a nice boost
- tabtab 3y agoWhat about embracing forms of tent cities rather than disparaging them? Homo Sapiens have been sleeping in teepees and portable huts for roughly a hundred thousand years; we have evolved to survive in such. Have shared showers, restrooms, washrooms, etc. I can't say it would work in all climates, but in many.
- poisonborz 3y agoWould you really create vast amounts of permanent housing of the lowest quality? That doesn't even work with proper walled houses let alone tents. See favellas or Kowloon walled city.
- pleasecalllater 3y agoI'm involved in an Intervention Hostel in Poland/Europe. Many people need short-term help, not only with homelessness but they also need some real support. What is provided by the city, is only some night shelter, where they can eat, sleep, and wash. The thing they don't get is a psychiatrist and psychological treatment. The Intervention Hostel provides that too. From my perspective, one of the main problems is that, in general, people are not interested in helping those homeless people. We have problems with gathering money, there is no city support, and we also have higher costs (because of the psychiatrist and psychological treatment). We have quite nice results, but every three months we think about closing it due to lack of funds. The thing that made me really sad was that when a couple of days ago one of Polish parliament members hit a woman and used a fire extinguisher on a hanukkah menorah, people gathered over $50k in just a couple of hours to support him. However, when I was in USA a couple of years ago, I have never seen so many homeless people on the streets. This is really worrying and sad.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nojvek 3y agoSeeing that wages mostly remained same but inflation shot up, I’d imagine homelessness would also shoot up. It is a paradox that the world’s richest country has such a high level of homelessness. I think in 50 years we’ll either view current homelessness and poverty now like we view slavery or that the technoelite will use AI and regulatory capture and further the divide with quarter of country barely surviving. US compared to its developed peers has lower life expectancy. That surprised me. So many people refusing care because they can’t afford it and die early. US is really a country of extremes.