For years now, I have continually reiterated how the majority of personal bankruptcies in the US were due to excessive medical bills from major accidents or catastrophic illness. What isn’t always understood is that similar to many major diseases that are known to kill the patient, many times the actual death occurs from secondary issues, not the actual disease. As an example, many cancers don’t actually kill an individual, but it’s the damage done by the cancer invasion to various internal organs that eventually fail. That is the actual reason for the person’s passing.

The situations with today’s American personal bankruptcies are similar to those individuals having a catastrophic illness. And today’s health care insurance providers are mainly responsible for many of these failures that drive a family into losing everything from their job, to their home, to their lifetime retirement fund. As an example, a family in Tennessee, was just making ends meet on the husband’s patrolman salary until his wife developed debilitating back pain that required spinal surgery. This problem also forced her to quit nursing school. As with many medical bankruptcies, they had health insurance but their policy had a $3,000 deductible and, to their surprise, covered only 80% of their costs. As with most jobs that provide health care plans, this plan was the only choice for the husband and the total cost of the plan was over $800 per month. “I always promised myself that if I ever got in trouble, I’d work two jobs to get out of it,” said the 16-year veteran of the local police force. “But when it got to the point where two or three or four jobs wouldn’t take care of it.

The bills just were out of sight.” This family also had two small children. As with most young families, they had a mortgage and owed some money on credit cards and for the wife’s student loans. “But the medical problem is what took us down,” she said as she was packing to move from the two-bedroom house they will soon surrender to Wells Fargo Bank. “Everything was due, they wanted their money now, now, now, and it just became overwhelming.” In another case, after cortisone injections failed to cure a gimpy knee, a 31 year old man had surgery because the pain was forcing him to miss days of work as an emergency medical technician. His recovery kept him off the job for five months. Simultaneously, his wife, a 911 dispatcher, developed sciatica while pregnant and had to take months off on reduced disability pay. Their insurance policy, with an $850 monthly premium also has a $4,000 annual deductible requirement per family. As the bills rolled in, they compounded their troubles by placing medical charges on credit cards, simply to make the collection agencies stop calling. They fell months behind on their mortgage, and by August had lost their house and both cars. The husband has since taken a second job, said he found it ironic that it had not been the recession that forced them into bankruptcy. “I tell my wife that we beat the economy,” he said, “but health care beat us.” President Obama, while addressing a joint session of Congress in September had called on lawmakers to protect those “who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.” He also added: “These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans.” In addition, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, made a similar case in his recent floor speech calling for passage of a measure to open debate on the Senate health care bill.

The legislation moving through Congress would attack this problem in numerous ways. The bills from both houses provide health insurance subsidies for those making up to four times the federal poverty level. Insurers would be prohibited from denying coverage to those with pre-existing health conditions and out-of-pocket medical costs would be capped annually. How many personal bankruptcies might be avoided is unpredictable. However, there were “1.1 million personal bankruptcy filings in 2008”, and more are expected, both this year and next. Last summer, Harvard researchers published a headline-grabbing report that concluded that illness or medical bills contributed to 62% of the US bankruptcies in 2007, up from about half that in 2001. What is totally disturbing is that more than three-fourths of those bankruptcies due to major medical debt had health insurance. Some of the medical debtors were in financial trouble because they had lost their jobs, therefore they also lost their health insurance. And a small percentage had been summoned to face their creditors because they had just spent beyond their means. But most often, they were there merely because they, or their children, had become catastrophically ill. In the current campaign for expanding support for the overhaul of American’s health care, few arguments pack as much rhetorical punch as the “there-but-for-the-grace-of-God” notion that average American families, through no fault of their own, are going bankrupt solely because of massive medical debt.

How can those right-wing politicians that supported so many things like unnecessary wars in Iraq and other expensive bills without showing how they would be paid for, how can they still say “The country can’t afford American Health Care reform?” I say, “We cannot continue to allow the average American working family to lose everything, just because they get sick.” The United States of America is the only industrialized country in the world that allows this situation to occur. This is a travesty for the wealthiest nation on earth. We should all be highly embarrassed and we should hang our heads in shame that we have allowed this to be the case. It’s time to fix the problem. Copyright: G.Ater 2009 Follow me on Twitter: gater01