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Study Links Medical Costs and Personal Bankruptcy - BusinessweekHealth Care medical bills, the number one cause of bankruptcy. Republicans think that's great. It's why they want to end Medicare. We obviously need more bankruptcy and more people suffering. What a sadistic bunch.
That is nonsense (link?).
The number one cause of bankruptcy is too much debt and not enough income. The Obamacare propagandists use any doctor's bill on a BK list as proof that it was health care spending that caused the BK.
Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.
Medically related bankruptcies have been rising steadily for decades. In 1981, only 8% of families filing for bankruptcy cited a serious medical problem as the reason, while a 2001 study of bankruptcies in five states by the same researchers found that illness or medical bills contributed to 50% of all filings. This newest, nationwide study, conducted before the start of the current recession by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler of Harvard Medical School, Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, and Deborah Thorne, a sociology professor at Ohio University, found that the filers were for the most part solidly middle class before medical disaster hit. Two-thirds owned their home and three-fifths had gone to college.
But medically bankrupt families with private insurance reported average out-of pocket medical bills of $17,749, while the uninsured's bills averaged $26,971. Of the families who started out with insurance but lost it during the course of their illness, medical bills averaged $22,658. "For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection. Most of us have policies with so many loopholes, co-payments, and deductibles that illness can put you in the poorhouse," said lead author Himmelstein. "Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy."
A number of problems here. First, is the contention that medical debt causes bankruptcy. That is a fabricated claim. Damn near every person in bk has loads of various types of debt. You then provide an analysis of the Harvard study that concludes that 62% of bks are caused by medical problems. While I strongly doubt that assertion, that is very different from stating that medical debt caused the bks. Illness causes loss of job, loss of income. And also debt. But most filers have as much or more credit card debt than medical debt. Bankruptcies are caused, 100% of the time, by having too much debt. Lots of things contribute to that. Illness, divorce, job loss, overspending, etc.