America's perverse system of for profit health care that incentivizes insurance companies to deny health care is showing alarming signs that the system is approaching a complete breakdown. We need the leaders in Congress to stop seeing the problem from the Insurance Companies' perspective, and start seeing it from the perspective of Americans who increasingly are having their access to health care withdrawn by the Insurance Industry in order to bolster their profits.
The brand new Harvard Medical School study gives us the perfect blunt instrument we need to get the attention of the recalcitrant defenders of the insurance industry in the congress.
Illness, Medical Bills Linked to Growing Bankruptcy Numbers
David U. Himmelstein, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues analyzed data from a sample of 2,314 individuals who filed for in 2007. The researchers obtained bankruptcy court records of respondents and completed interviews with more than 1,000 of them.
They found that illness or medical bills contributed to 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies. Medical debts grew higher than $5,000 for 92 percent of those with a medical-related bankruptcy, and three-quarters of them had health insurance when they filed for bankruptcy.
The proportion of bankruptcies attributable to medical issues rose by nearly 50 percent between 2001 and 2007.
In any other country with an advanced industrialized economy (and a few without) this would be a huge national scandal that would topple the ruling government.
The people simply wouldn't stand for being abused by private corporations in this manner.
But not in the U.S.
The crisis in health care is spilling over into our legal system with skyrocketing rates of Medical Bankruptcies that add insult and poverty to injury, and add the burden of massive legal costs to the whole health care mess.
This rising wave of profit driven Medical Bankruptcies is likely to become a Tusnmi unless our leaders act to halt this abusive practice by redesigning the system to eliminate incentives that lead insurance companies to seek ways to avoid paying for costly but essential care.
Simply subsidizing more private insurance can't solve the problem when we can't rely on private insurers to live up to the promises they made to furnish the health care.
Of course that points toward one of two obvious choices:
(A) Preferably a single payer system.
(B) At minimum a robust public option to force the insurance companies to compete with care focused on patient outcomes, and not on maximizing profits.
Will this be enough to open the eyes of the most craven servants of the insurance industry in the Congress? Probably not, but it would be enough to move Congress members who are on or near the fence, especially if they start to hear about this glaring failure of the insurance industry every time they turn around.
This will take more than an e-mail.