Medical Bills Lead To 62% Of Personal Bankruptcies; 75% Of Those Have Health Insurance

With Congress in the midst of discussing health care reform, Reuters provides us with results from a very timely study:

Medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

But the stunning result is that the bankruptcies come primarily from families with health insurance:

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.

The study noted that it is not just the poor who are affected:

"Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations."

A Harvard researcher and advocate for single-payer health care offers a perspective on these results:

"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.

These grim results are not just from a single study. Here is the abstract from a similar study from last year:

About 57 million Americans were in families with problems paying medical bills in 2007–an increase of 14 million people since 2003, according to a new national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Problems paying medical bills increased for both nonelderly insured and uninsured people. Although the rate of medical bill problems is much higher for uninsured people, most people with medical bill problems–42.5 million–had insurance coverage. About 2.2 million people with medical bill problems were in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of their medical bills, and a much larger number reported other financial consequences, such as problems paying for other

When will Congress confront the fact that the health insurance industry exists to make money for itself, rather than to deliver health care? The Reuters article points out that many health insurance companies disappear just when they are needed most:

"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.

The solution? More from the article:

"We need to rethink health reform," Woolhandler said. "Covering the uninsured isn’t enough.

"Only single-payer national health insurance can make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by saving the hundreds of billions we now waste on insurance overhead and bureaucracy."

Think of the health care that could be delivered by the hundreds of billions of dollars now going to health insurance fat cats and their bureaucracy. Call your Congressperson today to demand single-payer health care for everyone.

[It should be noted that the study in the Reuters article covers the years 2001-2007, ending before the worst of the real estate mortgage crisis.]