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A Harvard study published in the American Journal of Medicine:
Quote:
Medical Bills Cause More Than Half of Bankruptcies
The number of U.S. personal bankruptcies that involved medical bills increased 50 percent in just six years. Sixty-percent of people who filed for bankruptcy had medical bills they could not pay. Of those, more than 75 percent had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts.
The study, published in the the American Journal of Medicine, was carried out by researchers at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University.
Accroding to the study: "Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income... Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations."
look at the cost of the LOWPAYING medicare/medicaid.....900 billion just to PARTIALLY cover less than 70 million people ......900 billion to cover 1/5 of the population
singlepayer would cost between 3 trillion and 6 trillion EVERY YEAR (we already spend 1 trillion so the NEW added cost would be 2-5 trillion)
we have 140 million tax FILERS, (of which nealy 50% dont pay anything)
3 trillion divided by 140 million is what.......$20,000
6 trillion divided by 150 million is what......$40,000
thats between 20k to 40k PER TAXPAYER.....CAN YOU AFFORD THAT
I've done year of homework and research...what have you done ..5 minutes on the internet
oh really..you really think costs will be cut ....I call shenanagins
things are expensive
for example the average hospital uses a lot of electricity...about 400,000 a month...thats 5 million dollars in electric costs yearly.....you are not going to cut that piece of overhead
when you go to the local doctor and pay him/her 100..its not 100 going into their pocket
they have lots of overhead costs:
rent/lease/mortgage
property taxes
electric costs
equipment costs(and many pieces of equipment are not even made here)
cleaning costs
supply costs
personnel costs
etc
right now medicare/medicaid pay VERY LOW reembusment costs to the providers(doctors)...and many doctors are opting out...why because the money they get back doesnt cover their overhead...and the government is VERY SLOW at paying the doctors
320 million overweight people will be quite costly
and let's not forget: Obesity rates among OECD nations increased in recent years, with the highest rate in the U.S. at 34.3% -- which means one in 3 Americans is by definition obese.
number of americans getting cancer (new cases) per year 1.8 million for a total of 19 million people being treated (fighting) each year...each year at least 570,000 die from cancer
number of americans with heart desease: 26.2 million and of those
((Number of visits with heart disease as primary diagnosis: 16 million ))
((Number of discharges with heart disease as first-listed diagnosis: 4.2 million))
number of americans in nursing homes: 2 million
More than 25 million Americans have significant vision loss.
(((hmmm more than 25 million americans are blind or going blind.....that's more than norway,finland, denmark,switzerland,and austria COMBINED TOTAL population....)))
number of americans with diabetes: 26 million
mumber of americans with asthma: 20 million....Each day 11 Americans die from asthma.
while some of those may overlap...look at those numbers 19,26,25,26,20...that's 116 million with MAJOR health problem,,costly problems......we will ALWAYS be the largest spender in the world...we have the 3rd hightest population in the world (next to china and india) and we have more people (total, not a percentage) with major problems than any other country in europe.....I just showed you at least 116 million people with cancer,heart,blindness, diabetes, asthma.......that's more than france and great britian COMBINED for their total populations.
meanwhile ther are 2-4 trillion dollars worth of health CARE costs yearly
the year cost of diabetes is 300 billion...that just one disease in this country
how are you going to control the cost of medical equipment(mri or xray machines, etc)??????most xray machine are made in denmark
how are you going to control the cost of the rising electric bills the doctors/hospitals are facing????
how are you going to control the rising property tax/rent/mortgage that doctors face?????
how are you going to control the cost of supplies(gauze, plaster, silk, rubber, polystirene( a oil product)?????especially some supplies that arent even american
how are you going to control the cost of people salaries???? a maximum wage???
how they are going to control the employment costs for Doctors, nurses, technicians, hospital food operators, hospital linnon cleaning service, custodial services, medical transcribers........are you going to 'nationalize' every profession that is even remotely connected to medicine????
how are they going to control malpractice INSURANCE COSTS?????
dont you get it... medicine (like anyother SERVICE) costs money,,(,money that our government doesnt have)
I asked a simple question.....HOW are you going to control costs OF MEDICINE, not INSURANCE..........because you CANT...and it will get worse and worse as inflation devalues our dollar
look at the cost of the LOWPAYING medicare/medicaid.....900 billion just to PARTIALLY cover less than 70 million people ......900 billion to cover 1/5 of the population
singlepayer would cost between 3 trillion and 6 trillion EVERY YEAR (we already spend 1 trillion so the NEW added cost would be 2-5 trillion)
we have 140 million tax FILERS, (of which nealy 50% dont pay anything)
3 trillion divided by 140 million is what.......$20,000
6 trillion divided by 150 million is what......$40,000
thats between 20k to 40k PER TAXPAYER.....CAN YOU AFFORD THAT
THAT is insane. COBRA for the insurance my family has is around $14K right now for four of us. We cannot afford this.
the harvard study, first made in a 2005 Health Affairs article, is at variance with four decades of economic research, including a finding that even large medical bills have no impact on family living standards.
The paper by David Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler was published as a Health Affairs web exclusive on February 5, 2005. The authors are strong proponents of government run health care.
The data comes from 1,250 personal bankruptcy cases, assumed to be representative of the almost 1.5 million households that filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The data on each bankruptcy were abstracted from court records and supplemented with 931 telephone interviews. The paper's conclusions about illnesses in households were based on medical interviews conducted with 391 people. The paper does not specify how those people were selected. It does say that Himmelstein and Woolhandler (H & W), both MDs, coded the diagnoses given by debtors into the categories used for the analysis.
The classifications used to determine a medical bankruptcy were odd. Only 28.3 percent of the sample cited self-reported illness or injury as a cause of bankruptcy. However, H & W managed to almost double that figure (to 54.5 percent) by counting the following as "illnesses":
•1. A birth or addition of a new family member
•2. A death in a family
•3. A drug or alcohol addiction
•4. Uncontrolled gambling
•5. Loss of at least 2 weeks of work-related income due to illness or injury by anyone in the household
•6. Out-of-pocket medical bills of $1,000 in the two years before filing by anyone in the household
•7. Mortgaging a home to pay medical bills.
In a 2005 article in the Northwestern University Law Review, Prof. Todd J. Zywicki called the $1,000 threshold for contributing medical debt "indefensible." That's an understatement. By H & W criteria, a bankruptcy with $50,000 in student loans and $1,001 in unpaid medical bills would be classified as a "medical bankruptcy." Moreover, the average U.S. household had out-of-pocket expenses of $2,182 in 2001!
In a 2006 review (gated) of the H & W study results in Health Affairs, David Dranove and Michael L. Millenson:
•Recalculate the medical bankruptcy rate using the data given in the H & W paper. They conclude that just 17 percent of the H & W sample "had medical expenditure bankruptcies," although it cannot be stated "with any degree of certainty whether medical spending was the most important cause of bankruptcy."
•Explain that "four decades of studies have addressed the bankruptcy-medical spending connection" and that the results from those studies are much closer to their 17 percent estimate than to the 54.5 percent estimates of H & W.
•Cite a 2002 Fay, Hurst, and White American Economic Review study, which found no statistical link between bankruptcies and health problems.
•Cite a 1999 Domowitz and Sartain Journal of Finance study, which found that high medical debt raised the probability of bankruptcy for the tiny proportion of the population that had high medical debt, but that at the margin, credit cards were the largest single contribution to bankruptcy.
Moreover, Helen Levy in an Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured working paper estimated the effect of being diagnosed with a serious new health condition, (cancer, diabetes, heart attack, chronic lung disease, or stroke) and found that household consumption "remains smooth" in the face of serious health shocks for both insured and uninsured households.
YET:
A study by the Department of Justice examined more than 5,000 bankruptcy cases between 2000 and 2002. It found that 54% of bankruptcies involve no medical debt, and more than 90% have medical debt of less than $5,000. Even among the minority of bankruptcies that report medical debt, only a few have enough to cause personal bankruptcy.
the harvard study, first made in a 2005 Health Affairs article, is at variance with four decades of economic research, including a finding that even large medical bills have no impact on family living standards.
The paper by David Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler was published as a Health Affairs web exclusive on February 5, 2005. The authors are strong proponents of government run health care.
The data comes from 1,250 personal bankruptcy cases, assumed to be representative of the almost 1.5 million households that filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The data on each bankruptcy were abstracted from court records and supplemented with 931 telephone interviews. The paper's conclusions about illnesses in households were based on medical interviews conducted with 391 people. The paper does not specify how those people were selected. It does say that Himmelstein and Woolhandler (H & W), both MDs, coded the diagnoses given by debtors into the categories used for the analysis.
The classifications used to determine a medical bankruptcy were odd. Only 28.3 percent of the sample cited self-reported illness or injury as a cause of bankruptcy. However, H & W managed to almost double that figure (to 54.5 percent) by counting the following as "illnesses":
•1. A birth or addition of a new family member
•2. A death in a family
•3. A drug or alcohol addiction
•4. Uncontrolled gambling
•5. Loss of at least 2 weeks of work-related income due to illness or injury by anyone in the household
•6. Out-of-pocket medical bills of $1,000 in the two years before filing by anyone in the household
•7. Mortgaging a home to pay medical bills.
In a 2005 article in the Northwestern University Law Review, Prof. Todd J. Zywicki called the $1,000 threshold for contributing medical debt "indefensible." That's an understatement. By H & W criteria, a bankruptcy with $50,000 in student loans and $1,001 in unpaid medical bills would be classified as a "medical bankruptcy." Moreover, the average U.S. household had out-of-pocket expenses of $2,182 in 2001!
In a 2006 review (gated) of the H & W study results in Health Affairs, David Dranove and Michael L. Millenson:
•Recalculate the medical bankruptcy rate using the data given in the H & W paper. They conclude that just 17 percent of the H & W sample "had medical expenditure bankruptcies," although it cannot be stated "with any degree of certainty whether medical spending was the most important cause of bankruptcy."
•Explain that "four decades of studies have addressed the bankruptcy-medical spending connection" and that the results from those studies are much closer to their 17 percent estimate than to the 54.5 percent estimates of H & W.
•Cite a 2002 Fay, Hurst, and White American Economic Review study, which found no statistical link between bankruptcies and health problems.
•Cite a 1999 Domowitz and Sartain Journal of Finance study, which found that high medical debt raised the probability of bankruptcy for the tiny proportion of the population that had high medical debt, but that at the margin, credit cards were the largest single contribution to bankruptcy.
Moreover, Helen Levy in an Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured working paper estimated the effect of being diagnosed with a serious new health condition, (cancer, diabetes, heart attack, chronic lung disease, or stroke) and found that household consumption "remains smooth" in the face of serious health shocks for both insured and uninsured households.
YET:
A study by the Department of Justice examined more than 5,000 bankruptcy cases between 2000 and 2002. It found that 54% of bankruptcies involve no medical debt, and more than 90% have medical debt of less than $5,000. Even among the minority of bankruptcies that report medical debt, only a few have enough to cause personal bankruptcy.
The Harvard study only looked at bankruptcies filed in 2007. I don't know what your copy and paste job above is in reference to.
Quote:
Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers.
One question I have is why there are no charities that cover the costs when someone doesn't have insurance? Perhaps people should see to it they have insurance BEFORE they get sick.
THAT is insane. COBRA for the insurance my family has is around $14K right now.
yep..
think about it
right now most people have EMPLOYER provided health insurance
that the EMPLOYER PAYS 75%+/- of the premuim..the employee pays 25% (give or take)
the employee CURRENTLY PAYS (about) 300-400 a month....while the employer pays 900-1200 a month...for a total monthly premium of....about15k (14400-19000)
undersingle payer..the TAXPAYER will be hit with that bill...companies and corporations will actually love the savings they are getting while the individual taxpayer gets killed
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