Herald-Dispatch, The
(Huntington, WV)
Medical bills can push patients over the financial cliff,
but a new study says this may not happen as often as previous research
suggests.Hospitalizations cause only about 4 percent of personal bankruptcies
among non-elderly U.S. adults, according to an analysis published Wednesday in
the New England Journal of Medicine.
This contrasts with previous research by former Harvard
professor and current U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others that pointed to
medical reasons as the trigger for more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies.
In the new study, researchers tracked the credit reports
of more than a half million adults under 65 in California who had a
hospitalization between 2003 and 2007 that wasn't tied to childbirth. They
found that hospitalizations clearly forced some patients into bankruptcy in the
years following their stay, said study co-author Matthew Notowidigdo, a
Northwestern University economist. It just may not happen as frequently as the
other research indicates.
"What causes bankruptcies is still somewhat unknown,
but it appears that medical expenses are responsible for a much smaller share
of them than previously thought," said co-author Raymond Kluender of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Researchers also estimated that hospitalizations were
responsible for only about 6 percent of bankruptcies among uninsured patients.
They noted that hospitalization rates are lower in that patient group compared
to the overall non-elderly population.
The new analysis included a broader range of people than
earlier research, which focused on those who already had filed for bankruptcy
protection.
Such a narrow focus makes it "impossible to infer the
role of medical expenses in causing bankruptcy" without information on
those who had big medical bills and didn't sink financially, the authors of
Wednesday's report noted.
Their study also had limitations: It focused only on adult
patients from one state who were hospitalized.
Kluender said hospital stays often are the first event
that triggers a "chain of struggles with medical expenses and medical
debt."
The research looked at hospitalizations that occurred
several years before the federal Affordable Care Act expanded insurance
coverage to millions of Americans.
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