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Originally Posted by clegane
Each year, two million Americans go bankrupt trying to pay medical bills and most of them had medical insurance. Private insurance for those not obscenely rich is fast becoming not enough |
http://www.pnhp.org/bankruptcy/Illne...Bankruptcy.pdf
Here's the actual study. I looked it over and the statistical methodology looks sound. However, what was interesting was that the mean out of pocket medical expenses in the year prior to bankruptcy was around $3.5K, with total out of pocket medical expenses since the beginning of the medical condition being over $11K.
That doesn't seem like that much money to me to have saved up for a rainy day, and so for me, a weakness of this study is the failure to control for other factors such as savings accumulated, disability coverage, mean income prior to the medical condition that caused the medical bankruptcy, etc. Without this context, I don't think you can make sound policy recommendations or isolate the true effects of the medical costs.