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- Dec 29, 2008
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Medical bills underlie 60 percent of U.S. bankrupts: study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.
"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.
CANCELED COVERAGE
"Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year," the report reads.
Medical bills underlie 60 percent of U.S. bankrupts: study | U.S. | Reuters
It is unclear that this study, which can be found here
http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf
has any relevance to the health insurance debate since it calls bankruptcies that resulted from a loss of income due to illness medical bankruptcies as well as those that resulted from medical bills.
We designated bankruptcies as medical based on debtors stated
reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the magnitude of their medical debts.
In fact, in table 2, it shows that while 29% of debtors reported the cause of bankruptcy was medical bills, 40.3% reported the cause to be loss of income because of the illness. None of the bills under consideration would help the latter group avoid bankruptcy.
Furthermore, the statement, "Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year," appears nowhere in the study.