At the blog Credit Slips, law prof Elizabeth Warren notes that “another 1.3 million people lost health insurance between 2004 and 2005. That brings the 2005 total to 46.6 million Americans without health insurance.” She writes:
With “medical bankruptcy” having entered the lexicon in the past year, this new stat makes me pause to think about risk. I just did an interview about this with Karen Springen at Newsweek. On the research side, papers with Melissa Jacoby and Debb Thorne (both on this blog) and David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler (both Harvard Medical School) show that health insurance is no guarantee that someone won’t end up in financial collapse following a serious medical problem. But insurance makes a difference on where the tipping point occurs. For the uninsured, the $11,000 hospital bill following a slightly dodgy appendectomy spells financial doom. For the insured, it may take a more serious round of surgery and rehab after a bad fall to hit that same $11,000 in uninured costs out of a total bill of $50,000. Of course, either group can be beaten up financially by time lost from work. This is all just a question of vulnerability by degrees.
The whole post is here. Credit Slips is a great blog, where the academic authors discuss all manner of credit and bankruptcy issues.
