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Medical bills
August 20, 2008
79 million Americans struggling to pay medical bills
Earlier this year I wrote about an Austin woman who found her high school sweetheart in middle age and then soon lost him to liver disease. She went bankrupt trying to pay his medical bills and lost their home after he had died.
At the time the story ran in February, experts I spoke with did not have recent data but they predicted that bankruptcies would rise as the economy worsened and that more people would end up in “medical bankruptcy.” Today, a report from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that promotes improvements in health care, says a “perfect storm” of ill economic winds, including soaring gas prices, expensive food and rising unemployment, are making it harder for adults and families to pay their medical bills. The report says that in 2007 “nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults, or an estimated 116 million people, struggled to pay medical bills, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time, or were underinsured.”
The report goes on to say that the “share of U.S. adults reporting that the costs of health care prevented them from getting needed care increased from 29 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2007.”
The Commonwealth Fund found that the problem touched all income groups, regardless of whether they had insurance.
There are other interesting nuggets in the report, and it’s worth checking out. Here are a few:
In 2007, 28 percent of U.S. adults, or an estimated 50 million people, were uninsured for some time during the past year, up from 24 percent in 2001.
One third of adults spent at least 10 percent or their incomes on health care, up from 21 percent in 2001.
More than 70 percent of adults with gaps in their health insurance coverage said they did not get needed care because of cost, up from just more than 50 percent in 2001.
Did you ever fear medical bills would cause you to go bankrupt?
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