Xavier Becerra

It's not enough.

You still have a big bill.

All of a sudden, you have to make a decision.

Do you pay the bill or do you stay in your home?

And I believe those are the folks that if we provided more support and I would create a stabilizing fund that would be there to help those Californians who are in a home.

Make sure they don't lose their home.

It will cost us far less to invest in someone maintaining their housing than trying to pull them off the street, get them to stand up, provide them the services, get them to temporary shelter, and then help them get reemployed.

And so let's invest in prevention before we start talking about just trying to pick people off the street.

First, I think we have to give everyone an opportunity to have an out.

And when I established the 988 program, and I hope some of you are familiar with it, it's like 911, but for mental health crisis and suicide prevention.

And if you dial 988 or actually text or chat, you'll get someone who will help you, not as a police officer, but as someone who can provide you services.

We do that.

We have a dedicated line for veterans who are hurting.

we had we had but this administration took it away a line for lgbtqi who wanted to be able to speak to somebody would understand their concern we have to give people an out an opportunity but what happens too often is we don't do that and then we don't do the second thing is to make sure that we tell folks we are your keeper i am my brother and my sister's keeper we will not let you languish in the streets and if you keep saying no and it's clear that you need help

then it's really our responsibility as civilized people to make sure we provide our brother or sister some assistance.

And so I think we have to get to that point.

We don't let people make that decision when it's clear they're not making the right decisions for themselves.

Very similar to the carrot and stick approach, which I use, by the way, at HHS, we had to help doctors switch from paper record keeping, prescriptions, their medical records, to digital, to finally join the electronic world.

A lot of folks said, we can't afford it.

And so what we did was we scaled it.