The main difference between the health and well-being of bums in the UK vs the US is the NHS. Homeless people can get quality (well, quality by UK standards) healthcare for their scabies, infected track marks, and STIs, where as in the US unless they’re on file for some sort of indigent care, they’re down to pay. Now for Chis, who probably already has a few health concerns, this means leaving them untreated unless he is set up on some sort of Medicaid (hopefully considering he gets his Social Security tard bux).
The price of medication can be cheaper, not the cost. Someone, somewhere is paying, just not necessarily the recipient. It's the same everywhere, except in the U.K. the taxpayer takes it in the shorts, while in the U.S. it's other health care customers.
Like I said, it's the working poor who get screwed. But then that's always the case.
The US medical insurance for the poor, Medicaid, is not that bad. If you're totally indigent, it can actually be quite good in terms of services for money spent (zero, if you're totally indigent). In states that accepted Medicaid expansion (i.e. states not run by Republicans that opposed it on ideological principles -- it's 100% a win for state budgets so some red states accepted it), the working poor can do okay on it.
It's basically like a shittier version of NHS. The wait times are longer, the facilities are fewer and often far away, and the pain in the ass at obtaining treatment is higher than the NHS, but it works and if you're dirt poor, it's free.
The big problem is that the homeless are often retarded, drug addicted, or mentally ill, and you need serious technical skills to plan and navigate utilizing these services. You have to schedule your appointments, show up on time, then make new appointments with another office, and show up for that, and keep all your shit together. Retards cannot do that. Even relatively non-retarded people cannot do that.
If food were like that, you'd have to carefully schedule your appointments at the grocery office and then get referred to separate appointments at the facilities that provided produce, meat, or breakfast cereal.
THAT is the reason that the homeless use the emergency room so much. You don't need to plan to use it, you just show up and say you're sick. They won't take you unless you are actually seriously sick, which is why the homeless don't get much in the way of preventative health care.
Free clinics help somewhat, and can provide basic services, but there's a huge "missing middle" between patching boo boos and resuscitating from cardiac arrest. You can't get a preventative specialist treatment easily without navigating the bureaucracy, so homeless people either get minor problems fixed (if they're not too insane), or they show up at the emergency room dying.
For the middle class (or in many states, the working poor) in America it's even worse because suddenly you have copays and deductibles on everything, so you have to weigh the cost of thousands of dollars getting some surgery now that will prevent you from winding up hospitalized later.
The NHS sucks in some ways but they still get better outcomes for less money, the big thing being you show up at your doctor and they can provide a relatively simple path onward to treatment that you need.