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Medical Bankruptcy - Time to update that statistic |
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One American goes bankrupt every 30 seconds due to health care costs. It’s a statistic I use over and over to make the point that we need reform now.
Bankruptcy is a personal tragedy, of course. But it’s also an economic catastrophe. How do we expect to get out of our economic crisis is health care costs are keeping hardworking Americans down like that?
That statistic was based off the fact that a majority of all bankruptcies in America were due to health care costs. But that number just went up:
Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
The most striking part about this is the last paragraph - 75% of these people have health insurance.
This basically proves that private health insurance in America is little more than a scam. Isn’t the whole point of insurance to avoid personal ruin by large medical costs by paying bit by bit over time? Clearly, if most of the people going bankrupt due to medical costs are insured, private insurance is not performing its core purpose.
This is the essence of why we need reform, to force private insurance to actually insure people, or give people an option to join a plan with the public’s interest in mind if private insurance refuses to change.
And, someone needs to recalculate that one-every-30-seconds number.
(also posted at the NOW! blog)
Insurance is certainly a problem, but it’s not the entire problem. Unpatentable natural remedies are blocked because the pharmaceutical companies don’t want less expensive competition.