Not even close[0]

There is healthcare in America[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

[1] Doesn't actually need a source

Holy shit. As a Canadian who moved to the US, that was quite surprising.

Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem.

I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...

Yeah I'm not sure. The presence of homeless people seems to be far more a function of how aggressive the government is at removing them than anything else. Melbourne is absolutely packed with homeless, but Sydney far less so, and I have a feeling it's not because of Sydney's cheap rent[0] or a lack of broken homes in the city. I suspect such a business oriented, conservative city is just more tough on its homeless.

[0] Sydney rents are insanely steep

I don't think the commenter meant healthcare as in hospitals and medicine being available; AFAIK the US has nothing like what most other countries has where it is facilitated for most or all citizens to access health care at minimum or no costs.

The commenter is responsible for the disconnect in their hyperbole as far as I'm concerned. America has a mix of systems including Medicare and Medicaid which are actually very similar to the systems we have in Australia. I just got out of hospital recently and didn't have to pay a cent, and at that moment I was really glad for the system we have in some ways, even if it doesn't totally gel with my professed ideology.

However if I were earning any kind of money at all, I would have paid out the nose for it, with some small help from the Government. The system here is actually very similar to what the American system would be if it functioned better. Medicare subsidises but doesn't eliminate costs for many low-income people, you pay for private insurance if you have money or else you get a big fat tax which is worse than any insurance fees. The Australian system is definitely nicer if you are absolutely dirt poor (by Western Standards) like me, but otherwise it's pretty much a correctly functioning version of what the American system aims for, ideologically and conceptually it actually doesn't differ much. I'm not sure why ours seems to work so much better.

Firstly, that list is useless because you're comparing wildly different definitions of "homeless". The US was counting

> The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.

> Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.

While the UK was counting

> The study, by housing charity Shelter, found that 307,000, or one in every 200, people are now either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.

Temporary accommodation includes bed&breakfast, staying with friends, emergency shelters. There are about 5000 people sleeping rough in the UK at the moment in a population of about 60million.

And then look at the countries who have worse homelessness than the US.

Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Indonesia, China, Haiti, Venezuela, India, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Ukraine.

the land of the 98% free!