The thing that got him off the street was seeing a dentist, who pulled an infected tooth.
Turns out he was in extreme pain at all times, but didn't know it.
If we'd had universal health care he wouldn't have ended up homeless.
From what I can tell, chronic pain eventually morphs into "background noise" in a person's life. It's there, but similar to depression or anxiety, it just becomes a new normal and people develop strategies to deal with it. Often that's drug abuse.
Quoting from this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10035485/
...we found that limited information was reported on health outcomes in relation to quality of care within the context of UHC. In addition, there was a global lack of evidence on measures of quality of care related to UHC...
Anecdotally, I have had access to rather cheap healthcare almost my entire life, but opted not to visit a dentist for 15 years.
> From what I can tell, chronic pain eventually morphs into "background noise" in a person's life.
This has been my experience, personally and vicariously.
Edit: I realized the linked paper refers to lack of data on outcomes. That is not really the question here. However, it would be nice to get more data on outcomes. The question here is whether the individual would have visited a dentist without knowing there is an issue. I tried to find data on dental visits in universal healthcare systems vs non and could not find anything.
1 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/british-teeth-arent-tha...
The biggest value proposition of universal healthcare (IMO) is preventive care, stopping minor issues from getting to the point of hospitalization.
— King Arthur, Excalibur (1981)