The idea that medical bankruptcy is the leading cause of bankruptcy is a carefully engineered fiction. The claim is normally worded something like "2/3 of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills" and includes a reference to an academic study[0], so it sounds super legit! But not only does the study not support the claim--it clearly contradicts the idea that Medicare For All would improve the situation.

You're probably rolling your eyes right around now, so I'll dispense with the characterizations and move on to the proof.

First of all, here's the actual main takeaway from the study:

> 62.1% of all bankruptcies have a medical cause.

Huh. "having a medical cause" is far from "caused by medical bills", right?. I wonder what "a medical cause" means?

> We included debtors who either (1) cited illness or injury as a specific reason for bankruptcy (27%), or (2) reported uncovered medical bills exceeding $1,000 in the past [two] years (27%), or (3) lost at least two weeks of work-related income because of illness/injury,(27%) or (4) mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. (2%)

So if I had a $1000 dollar operation two years ago, paid it off, then filed bankruptcy when my small business tanked last month, mine would be a "Medical bankruptcy".

Further down in the article, it gets better:

Only 35% of debtors had medical bills >$5000, while 92% of the 62% ("medical bankruptcies") had medical bills >$5000. But the average net worth for "medical bankruptcies" was -$44,000 (negative $44,000), while the average annual income was $31,000. In other words, these are people who, even in the absence of their medical debt, would almost certainly have been filing for bankruptcy anyway.

BTW--the median income of one of these bankruptcies, in conjunction with their median household size of 2.79, makes it clear that the vast majority of them were be eligible for Medicaid! Would a rebranding of their state-run healthcare leave them any better off?

[0] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(09)00404-5/fulltex...