“The greatest health is wealth,” the classical Roman poet Virgil once said.
But to keep your health can cost you your wealth. In fact, it can drive you into bankruptcy.
A survey this month showed that in 2007, on the eve of the current recession, roughly two-thirds of bankruptcies in the United States involved people who were driven into insolvency because they could not keep up with their medical bills.
Although health care has been eclipsed by overdue mortgages and credit card debt as the primary cause of bankruptcy, it remains a potent driver of debt. And once the current wave of foreclosures abates, it could quickly regain its No. 1 status in the bankruptcy courts, unless something is done to fix the medical system first.
“Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” said David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard.
“For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection. Most of us have policies with so many loopholes, co-payments and deductibles that illness can put you in the poorhouse,” Himmelstein said.
The study by Himmelstein and a team of researchers at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University shows that 62 percent of bankruptcies in 2007 were at least partly caused by problems involving health care. That’s up from 55 percent in 2001.
More than three-quarters of the people who were bankrupted for medical reasons had health insurance at the start of the “bankrupting illness,” according to the study, which will be published in The American Journal of Medicine in August. Most of them “were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit.” Two-thirds were homeowners, and three-fifths had gone to college.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/june/are_you_one_big_illn.php