Bankruptcies caused by medical bills are not common
Actually, they appear to be rare, as a recent study has indicated. But one of the reasons for passing Obamacare was the idea pushed by the liberal/left (including and especially Elizabeth Warren) that medical bills were an enormous driver of bankruptcies. And there was no big drop in bankruptcies post-Obamacare, either; there’s been a gradual decline that was already starting years before the policy took effect.
Actually, a bigger driver is probably loss of income as a result of illness:
[A] paper found that the size of the drop in income after an illness was about five times that of the resulting medical bills, suggesting that the financial strain is likely to be much more driven by income loss than health-care costs. And indeed if you talk to bankruptcy practitioners, you’ll hear the stories of plumbers whose heart attacks forced them to cut back on work; surgeons who developed a tremor in their 50s and saw their income plummet too far to make the mortgage; mothers of special-needs kids who had to quit their jobs in order to become full-time case managers. If a family’s debt was pitched right up to the edge of their old income, insolvency quickly looms.
If Dobkin et al. are right, the people who quoted [Elizabeth] Warren’s inflated statistics, focused around medical bills, didn’t just overstate the problem; they had us focus on a problem we didn’t have, instead of the one we did.
Elizabeth Warren spoke an untruth to advance a political and policy agenda. Shocked I am (not).
She may only be about 60 years or so out of date. As my Mother fought a long, losing battle with cancer, my Dad lost his business, and had to sell their home to meet the costs.
Times have changed Ms Warren. (Is Ms still an accepted term? It is impossible to keep up.)
I also read that one of the ways Fauxie helped inflate the stats was to consider anyone who went bankrupt who had any outstanding medical bills as someone whose bankruptcy was “caused” by medical debt. So, right now I’m making payments on $2000 with of dental work. If I filled bankruptcy tomorrow (God forbid), I’d be counted among Fauxie’s stats — even though $2000 wouldn’t make a bankruptcy.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Oh my…someone on the left lied? Say it isn’t so.
Just following the Dem MO: find a problem, make up a cause that fits the agenda, push a solution that doesn’t fix either the real or the fake problem.
When I was a young whippersnapper with prospects I figured any big bucks I made would be forfeited to my younger, crazier sister when she got into trouble.
She got into plenty of trouble but the great state of Massachusetts paid the bill.
Elizabeth Warren has been a bullshitter since she entered the public arena. If $1,000 in uncovered medical bills is to be blamed for any subsequent bankruptcies in the next 2 years, then medical insurance itself — which costs several thousands of dollars for two years — should be blamed for most of the rest of bankruptcies.
A critical part of the WaPo story is this para.:
“The figure was based on a series of papers released by a team including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (then a professor at Harvard Law School) and co-authors David Himmelstein and Stephanie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program. Theirs was hardly the only paper to attempt an estimate of medical bankruptcies, but no one else got eye-popping numbers like that – or nearly so much attention from the media.”
Woolhandler is Harvard medical faculty, a profound Leftist who would worship Stalin. She was at one time an editor of the New England Journal, which is the official publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society. I began subscribing as a medical student in the 1960s, when it was THE journal to read for general medicine. And quit in the early 1990s, when it began the gross political shift that has continued unabated.
Medicine in Boston is today floridly Leftist-tinged. I see the effects in my son-in-law, who will be a chief resident of one of the Harvard services this year, an example of mimetic contagion.
Boston is also, I suspect, the origin of the most distasteful phrase, “evidence-based medicine”, as if physicians did not use evidence prior to randomized controlled double-blind studies, which of course all originate from medical academia, and require beaucoup $ to support FDA New Drug Applications by the ‘evil’ Big Pharma companies.
I am sorry to say it to Neo, a resident of the region, that the self-proclaimed superiority of Boston medicine is false. Relatives of mine have been subjected to remarkable, ignorant malpractice, proposed or actual, at the hands of Harvard medical faculty. In one case, I had to tell the family that if X were not done, a medical malpractice suit should follow. Harvard changed its mind, did not amputate, did what I said should be done, and an amputation was permanently avoided.
Frog:
You probably don’t remember this, but when I had my arm surgery (submuscular ulnar transposition) I had it done in Los Angeles.
There was a reason for that.