Study: Medical Bills Behind Most Bankruptcies
Crushing medical bills were the major cause of 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies in 2007. Even worse—75 percent of those with medical bill-related bankruptcies had health insurance.
More bad news: The percentages cited above were based on data collected before the nation’s economy began its long nose dive.
Says one of the study’s authors, David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School:
Unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you’re one illness away from financial ruin in this country. If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that’s the major finding in our study.
The U.S. health care financing system is broken, and not only for the poor and uninsured. Middle-class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones.
