Help The Middle ClassNews and Information For The Heart Of America
Changes In Health Care Won’t Stop Medical Bills From Being The Major Cause Of Personal Bankruptcy
Dr. David Himmelstein is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care doctor at the Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. Dr. Himmelstein is also a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. In 2005 and 2009, he helped write major studies finding that medical bills were a leading contributor to personal bankruptcies in the United States. He spoke to the freelance writer Anne Underwood.
Q.
How many medical bankruptcies are there annually in this country?
A.
The forecast for this year is that there will be 1.4 million to 1.5 million total bankruptcy filings. Our data say 62 percent of those will be medical. That works out to around 900,000 cases, and each one affects about 2.7 people. That makes roughly 2.4 million people who will suffer from new medical bankruptcy filings in 2009 alone.
Q.
What’s the fallout from declaring medical bankruptcy?
A.
We know that bankruptcy in general is considered hugely shameful. People who will tell you the intimate details of their sex lives will refuse to tell you about their bankruptcies. It shows up for years on credit reports. It creates problems in obtaining housing and getting jobs.
What we don’t have in our data is detailed knowledge of how medical bankruptcy affects people’s lives in the long term. There’s only short-term follow-up on these people. We know that six months later, they’re having great difficulty getting medical care. Their kids often have to change schools. Elderly relatives they cared for have their care disrupted. They often tell us they’re suffering utility shutoffs, forgoing food and skipping meals.
Q.
A major goal of health care reform is to cover the uninsured. But does covering more people necessarily mean that medical bankruptcies will decline?
A.
No. Our most recent study found that nearly two-thirds of Americans who declared bankruptcy cited illness or medical bills as a significant cause (PDF) of their bankruptcies. And of the medically bankrupt, three-quarters of that group had insurance, at least when they first got sick.
FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Insured, but Bankrupted Anyway – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.
