I just read Nicholas Kristof’s recent column in the NY Times (Until Medical Bills Do Us Part). One paragraph jumped out at me:
A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.
I’ll repeat that: 62% of bankruptcies are medical-related. And 78% of those people had health insurance.
It occurs to me that this gives us talking points (for discussions with our right-wing relatives or friends). More below.
Here’s the face-to-face argument.
Hold up eight fingers. Take eight people who declared bankruptcy in 2007.
Hold up five fingers. Five of them went bankrupt from medical bills.
Hold up four fingers. And of those five people, four of them had health insurance.
Here’s another version of the math – slightly more accurate. The population of the U.S. is approximately 300 million and in 2007 there were approximately 800,000 bankruptcies.
Take a small town of about 30,000 people. In 2007, approximately 80 people in that town declared bankruptcy (and that’s not counting their spouses or kids). Of those 80 people, 50 couldn’t pay their medical bills. Of those 50 people, 39 had health insurance.
If they ask where you got these numbers, tell them it was a study in the American Journal of Medicine, as reported by the New York Times.
The number one problem (in my mind) is that insurance companies want to make a profit and the way they do this by denying health care. If you break an arm or get a skin rash, they’re happy to pay. But if you get something major, they’ll try to figure out a way to cut you off.