Skull Pilot
Diamond Member
- Nov 17, 2007
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www.medicalcostadvocate.com HealthHe posted that 50% of bankruptcies were caused by medical bills. Not that medical bills were included in 50% of bankruptcies.
Read slowly and it's OK if your lips move.
we're not programming code which is stupid GIGO, we are using conversation which includes inference, agreed understanding and nuance...all within a contextual framework.
when discussing bankruptcy it is assumed/agreed/inferred that there are other bills. When it is said medical expenses cause a bankruptcy, it does not negate the idea that other bills were there. What is meant is that the added expense...the result of an illness...of medical bills was teh cause of a bankruptcy.
semantic games like the ones you play are way too sophomoric for my tastes.
the problem with some people who live, work, breath computers, is they start acting like computers. GIGO
Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
Woolhandler and her colleagues surveyed a random sample of 2,314 people who filed for bankruptcy in early 2007, looked at their court records, and then interviewed more than 1,000 of them.
They concluded that 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10 percent of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness. On average, medically bankrupt families had $17,943 in out-of-pocket expenses, including $26,971 for those who lacked insurance and $17,749 who had insurance at some point.
Overall, three-quarters of the people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance, they say.
That was actually the predominant problem in patients in our study 78 percent of them had health insurance, but many of them were bankrupted anyway because there were gaps in their coverage like co-payments and deductibles and uncovered services, says Woolhandler. Other people had private insurance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.
However, Peter Cunningham, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington, D.C., isnt completely convinced. He says its often hard to tell in which cases medical bills add to the bleak financial picture without being directly responsible for the bankruptcies.
Im not sure that it is correct to say that medical problems were the direct cause of all of these bankruptcies, he says. In most of these cases, its going to be medical expenses and other things, other debt that is accumulating.
Either way, he agrees that medical bills are an increasing problem for many people.
I think medical bills are something that a lot of families are having a lot of difficulty with and whether its the direct cause of bankruptcy or whether it helps to push them over the edge because they already were in a precarious financial situation, its a big concern and hopefully thats what medical reform will try to address, he says.
The study may overestimate the number of bankruptcies caused by medical bills yet underestimate the financial burden of health care on American families, because most people struggle along but dont end up declaring bankruptcy, according to Cunningham.
Bankruptcy is the most extreme or final step for people who are having problems paying medical bills, he says. Medical bills and medical costs are an issue that can very easily and in pretty short order overwhelm a lot families who are on otherwise solid financial ground, including those with private insurance.
His groups research found that medical bills unduly stress 1 in 5 families.
So the only thing that the bankruptcy was filed for was medical bills and nothing else was included right?
Wrong.