The US healthcare financing system is a disaster and needs reform. But if you look deeper into the alarmist reports about medical bankruptcies you'll find that they're lying with statistics to push a political narrative.
The US healthcare financing system is a disaster and needs reform. But if you look deeper into the alarmist reports about medical bankruptcies you'll find that they're lying with statistics to push a political narrative.
> The article by Himmelstein et al1 in this issue of the The American Journal of Medicine documents that health care expenses were the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States in 2007, accounting for 62% of US bankruptcies compared with 8% in 1981.2
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
> Table 1 displays debtors’ responses regarding the (often multiple) contributors to their bankruptcy. The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
I find this framing to be extremely misleading. "Medical bankruptcies" suggests something like someone gets cancer and insurance doesn't cover the treatment and they end up a million bucks in debt to the hospital. But the numbers above seem to cover someone who got fired, bet all their savings on black at the roulette table, and also visited the dentist.