I was shocked and greatly disturbed this morning listening to my local AM talk radio station as they broke down a newly-released study from Harvard. My impression from the talk show host was that this was initially a study just on the subject of bankruptcy and what the prevalent causes were. I was led to believe that the researchers were stunned to find out that over half of all bankruptcies in the US were due to a medical illness. What the study claimed was that a majority of the people affected by this scenario were people of the middle-class, college educated, well employed, with a decent job, AND FULLY INSURED!!!
This study has been buzzing all over the news now with such titles as:
-“Half of Bankruptcy Due to Medical Bills”
ABC News
-“Sick and Broke”
Washington Post
-“Study: Health costs spur bankruptcy”
CNN: Money
Personally, I started to panic. I know I’m young (relatively speaking) and that means that I most likely will have some sort of serious medial illness in my future and will need some sort of medical protection if and when it happens. I actually started thinking about socializing medical care for the first time -although the thought of the same people that run the DMV now running our hospitals is fairly scary. Even though there is plenty of reasons NOT to adopt socialized medical care, with the rising costs of decent care, I truly started thinking about it.
But then I did my homework. I soon realized that a portion of the researchers on the study had an agenda from the beginning -and that agenda can probably be pretty obvious by now! I also was aided in the analysis of the research data with the following articles:
-“Misdiagnosed: A medical-bankruptcy study doesn’t live up to its billing”
National Review
-“Medical Bankruptcy”
Galen Institute
I also realized that they were classifying such issues as gambling and drug addictions as “medical causes”. In reality, even their own statistics show that about a quarter of the bankruptcies included unreimbused medical expenses over $1000. That means that almost 3/4 of all bankruptcies listed were due to “non-medical” issues!!! Now there were volumes of additional problems found with this study that I’m sure you can read for yourself if you wish. I’m sure there are still plenty of people that were financially devastated by a serious medical illness but to willingly distort the facts to push their agenda is outright despicable in my book -not that I’m surprised to see it come from one of our Ivy-League universities…