A new approach to providing health services to homeless people to help keep them from unnecessarily clogging hospital emergency rooms received a little media attention the other day, but unfortunately quite a few questions were left unanswered.
The attention was driven by claims being publicly made by state Sen. Josh Green, the well-funded apparent front-running candidate for Lieutenant Governor, who has been questioned about their veracity by competing candidates.
Green, an emergency room physician, has said that he “went and opened a homeless health clinic in Chinatown,” which appears to be a vast overstatement if not outright fib, and that he raised $13 million to help the homeless.
In reality, it seems that he helped form a group to provide a model of healthcare that the group is using at the Chinatown location, which the Honolulu Police Department opened in June on Hotel Street, has volunteered there on occasion, and has helped raise commitments of money, mostly for a much-delayed center that the city is supposed to open some day in Iwilei.
The newspaper found that while he “has been remiss in some of his statements for not mentioning the work of his partners in creating and helping raise money for the Chinatown clinic, interviews with those involved revealed Green indeed played a central roll.”
That’s a polite way of saying he was definitely involved but has hogged credit to bolster his visibility and political ambitions while now insisting that “I think this is not a political issue, was never a political issue and really shouldn’t be a political issue.”
Green also now says that “I have always maintained that I founded it with this group of exceptional people.”
The newspaper devoted a significant amount of space to the subject, but included an awful lot of muddy stuff that left readers scratching their heads.
For instance:
Green and another doctor formed a nonprofit organization called the Hawaii Homeless Healthcare Hui, or “H4,” in anticipation of bidding on a city request for proposals to run the $6.3 million “state of the art” homeless services center in Iwilei that Mayor Kirk Caldwell announced more than two years ago to bolster his own wobbly political status during an election campaign.
The center still hasn’t opened and it’s unclear why, or whether bids were actually even solicited or made, and all the newspaper had to say about it was that the project “has faced delays.”
So that’s it. The city spent more than $6 million on a flagship homelessness project but it’s faced delays. Nothing about what has caused the delays, when the center is expected to open, or whether the leading candidate for the state’s second-highest elected office is directly involved in a current bid for a city contract to operate the facility after it has been stated that that was his intent.
Amazing.
Anyway, Green apparently also helped round up money to run the police department’s clinic in Chinatown, and its operations are being financed mainly by grants from The Queen’s Medical Center, HMSA, and Island Hospice–which all stand to save considerably more money than the amount of the grants by not having to treat the same homeless patients in emergency rooms.
It sounds like a good project that makes a lot of economic sense, so I certainly am not knocking it. Street dwellers reportedly account for thirty percent of emergency room visits on Oahu, and that certainly impacts everyone.
But as a taxpayer, I really want the politicians and the media to keep it real, and I want to know how much the Police Department spent on the Chinatown center, how much it is paying H4 to run it, where the hell more than $6 million in public money went for the Iwilei center, what Green’s specific role is in the Iwilei center, and when the public will see some results in Iwilei.
The newspaper noted that a similar homeless health clinic site in Kailua “should open soon” but provided no details about where, when, and by whom.
Green says that he will “take ownership” of the issues of homelessness and opioid addiction if he is elected Lieutenant Governor.
Somebody sure has to, and he is probably the most qualified to do it from among the current crop of candidates.
But not in the dark.
Honolulu Homeless Crisis 
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