Most Driven Into Debt by Medical Bills HAVE Health Insurance

Washington's Blog

Most driven into debt and bankruptcy by medical bills have health insurance. For example, Reader's Digest notes:

Between 2000 and 2003, seven in ten adults who were driven into debt by medical expenses had insurance at the time.

Similarly, as of 2009:

More than 2.2 million California adults report having medical debt, and two-thirds of those incurred the debt while insured, according to the authors of "The State of Health Insurance in California (SHIC)," a comprehensive new report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

And as the Washington Post pointed out last year:

Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released today by the American Journal of Medicine. That's nearly 20 percentage points higher than that pool of respondents reported were connected to medical costs in 2001.

Of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, nearly 80 percent had health insurance.

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Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis

Michael Cooper and Mary Williams Walsh
NY Times

The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.

While next year could be even worse, there are bigger, longer-term risks, financial analysts say. Their fear is that even when the economy recovers, the shortfalls will not disappear, because many state and local governments have so much debt — several trillion dollars’ worth, with much of it off the books and largely hidden from view — that it could overwhelm them in the next few years.

“It seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point,” said Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.

Some of the same people who warned of the looming subprime crisis two years ago are ringing alarm bells again. Their message: Not just small towns or dying Rust Belt cities, but also large states like Illinois and California are increasingly at risk.

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