Medical Bills and Bankruptciesby Aimee Amodio | More from this Blogger 08 Jun 2009 07:32 AM A recent study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation took a look at the connection between medical bills and bankruptcies in the United States. The results at a glance:
Researchers from Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, and Ohio University surveyed more than two thousand families who filed for bankruptcy during the first part of 2007 -- before the current recession began. Results were obtained from phone interviews and review of public bankruptcy court records. The most troublesome part for me is the fact that many of the people who had to declare bankruptcy due to medical bills had health insurance coverage of some sort. If you think health insurance will protect you, this study may be a wake-up call. People who believe they are protected may still be ending up with thousands of dollars in medical debt after acute or chronic health issues. Some annual out-of-pocket expenses noted by researchers in the study included:
I would be very interested to see how these amounts broke down -- did the people surveyed require a hospital stay for a health crisis? These numbers probably include the cost of prescriptions and routine physical exams... but is that the amount they spend every year on chronic health issues like MS or diabetes? I don't think that my grandmother -- who has diabetes and several diabetes-related complications that require care from four different doctors -- spends more than $26,000 per year on health care. So I have to wonder what else may have happened in the year studied to make the medical bills so high. Then again, prescription medications (of which my grandmother currently takes eight, for example) can get very expensive. And I wonder what type of insurance coverage the people in this study had -- was it through work, was it coverage via a spouse, was it an individual plan? It is kind of interesting to me that less than thirty percent of the people surveyed directly blamed their medical debt for the bankruptcy -- despite medical bills being a factor in more than sixty percent of the bankruptcy cases reviewed for the study. Is it a case of turning a blind eye, or were other debts so large that the medical debts seemed like very little in comparison? The study was published in the American Journal of Medicine if you're interested in taking a further look. Learn more about Aimee Amodio  Aimee is a fiction writer... dog lover... music lover... Relevanthealth tags User Comments  ruthann8 (6378) 08 Jun 2009 09:13 AMMy husband has type 1 diabetes. And as long as everything goes smoothly and he has NO issues the average we spend on health care is a little over $100 a week. About 5-6 thousand a year. That is only IF he has no issues. The year he decided to get the insulin pump was about twice that. Insurance covered 80% of the pump but after you add in all the extra appointments and trainings it adds up. Throw in an ER visit you add 1-2 thousand. Hospital stays can add up too. And we have decent insurance.  Aimee Amodio (11995) 08 Jun 2009 04:58 PMThanks for breaking it down for me, Ruthann! Your openness has helped to satisfy my curiosity. :) It makes me think that the people from the survey must have had some catastrophic thing happen where they were in the ER a lot or had a hospital stay. Nadia_Medt (30) 16 Oct 2009 08:56 AMNow more than ever, many Americans are being forced to decide between affording their prescription or their next meal. With more than half of America's population taking prescriptions daily, this hits home to most of us. One valuable resource to keeping your health costs within reason is researching discount generic alternatives to pricey brand name prescription drugs. Search engines such as www.medtipster.com are really easy to use and find nearby generic medications for as little as $4. Community Tags bankruptcy, health care, health insurance, Medical Bills Discuss this article
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