Newsweek Online ran a strong story today about the impact of medical problems on financial health. It began with 12-year-old Candace Jackson who has $90,000 of medical bills not covered by insurance. Last week on Warren Reports Matthew King‘s mom worried about running up against the lifetime caps on their health insurance, with $1.5 million in medical bills so far, and multiple surgeries in the future.
Candace and Matthew are today’s headliners, but one in every five families in America is dealing with unpaid medical bills. The see the abyss.
So I have to ask: How many more Matthews and Candaces and millions of other children and their parents and grandparents will have to go flat busted over health care before someone leads us to real change? How many will have to lose their homes? How many will have to file for bankruptcy? How many will have to wake up in the night sick with fear that they can’t pay both the phone bill and the doctor bill?
The stories never stop. And the data back them up.
The Newsweek piece relies in part on my research with Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler at the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Deborah Thorne at Ohio University. We reported that about half of all bankruptcies occurred in the financial aftermath of a medical problem. What really chapped the insurance industry, however, was our finding that about three-quarters of these families had some form of health insurance at the onset of their illnesses or accidents. We concluded that not even the insured were safe in America.
The insurance industry response did not respond by examining the problem to find out what it was about their coverage that left families so vulnerable. (Perhaps they already knew the answer?) Instead, the industry hired someone to try to make our data controversial. Professor Melissa Jacoby and I re-analyzed those data, and we tried to isolate every complaint from the industry so that readers could review the data themselves, but the results came out the same: medical problems were connected to about half of the bankruptcy filings.
There is surely no one left in America who doesn’t have a cousin or a neighbor or a dear friend who hasn’t been put in the financial cross-hairs by an illness. Even business owners are starting to worry about footing their share of the bill. So why isn’t this the number one political issue in America today? Why aren’t politicians who are nervous about their jobs hanging onto this issue like a life raft? Why aren’t ambitious job-seekers who want to unseat those politicians shouting from the rafters that they will push for a serious, comprehensive plan to help ordinary Americans deal with the fallout from a serious medical problem? I guarantee that one in five Americans would be listening. And their cousins and neighbors and dear friends.
While the insurance industry tries to direct attention elsewhere, and while the politicians talk in half-measures or no measures at all, millions more families families like Matthew’s and Candace’s cannot wake up from their financial nightmares.
I can’t keep reading these stories and looking at the pictures of these children. When does it stop?
