Why should "we" pay for "them"? : an excerpt from "Rough Sleepers"

I hear (and more often overhear) the same things about food pantries and public potlucks as expressed in this quote from Rough Sleepers.  Heavy sigh.  Not from the majority of people, fortunately.  There should be no us and them...most of us are only one disaster away from needing help.  Please remember the saying, "There but for the grace of God go I."    

Over the years [Doctor] Jim had heard, and more often overheard, objections to the Program's expanding practice: Many people who worked and paid taxes struggled to pay for health insurance.  Why should their money go to providing what some would consider concierge medicine for these people who lived at public expense?  For people who produced nothing except indecent public spectacles, and didn't even try to take care of themselves....What was the alternative?  Ignore chronically homeless people, as the city used to do, or imitate draconian regimes and imprison all rough sleepers in a stadium?  

In fact, the Program lightened the burdens that homeless people placed on other medical organizations, and did so while providing good care at lower cost than in hospital emergency departments.  Many of its patients were broken people, often damaged from infancy, and it was the Program's mission to mend what it could.  Jim once told me [Tracy Kidder] he wanted to say something combative to the critics: "We're making up for what wasn't done for our patients.  What you didn't provide--schools, jobs, safety."  (pg 93)

Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers, Random House, 2023