Most Driven Into Debt by Medical Bills HAVE Health Insurance

Washington's Blog

Most driven into debt and bankruptcy by medical bills have health insurance. For example, Reader's Digest notes:

Between 2000 and 2003, seven in ten adults who were driven into debt by medical expenses had insurance at the time.

Similarly, as of 2009:

More than 2.2 million California adults report having medical debt, and two-thirds of those incurred the debt while insured, according to the authors of "The State of Health Insurance in California (SHIC)," a comprehensive new report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

And as the Washington Post pointed out last year:

Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released today by the American Journal of Medicine. That's nearly 20 percentage points higher than that pool of respondents reported were connected to medical costs in 2001.

Of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, nearly 80 percent had health insurance.

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