Health Care and the Homeless

To the Editor: The recent study by Hibbs et al. (Aug. 4 issue) 1 addresses the important question of the mortality rate among homeless people in a large U.S. city. Their finding of a mortality rate nearly four times that of the general population may unfortunately be an underestimation of the true mortality rate due to the design of their study. During the three years of the study, an unknown number of persons returned to their former social-support network or obtained new housing, and thus ceased to be homeless. By assuming that all 10,715 study subjects remained homeless throughout the study . . .