The number of people that have medical bill problems increased drastically between 2005 and 2007 to a whopping 41% or 72 million people.
New York, NY, August 20, 2008The proportion of working-age Americans who have medical bill problems or who are paying off medical debt climbed from 34 percent to 41 percent between 2005 and 2007, bringing the total to 72 million, according to recent survey findings from The Commonwealth Fund. In addition, 7 million adults age 65 and over also had problems paying medical bills, for a total of 79 million adults with medical bill problems or medical debt.
In a new Commonwealth Fund report about the survey findings, Losing Ground: How the Loss of Adequate Health Insurance is Burdening Working Families, the authors describe how working-age adults are becoming more exposed to the rising costs of health care, either because they have lost insurance through their jobs or because they are paying more out of pocket for their health care. This combination of factors, along with sluggish growth in average family incomes, is contributing to problems with medical bills and cost-related delays in getting needed health care.
What can we conclude from this? First, having health insurance does not protect you from medical debt. I noted that an uninsured woman traveled to Thailand for a hysterectomy last month, including travel, the procedure cost her less than 1/4th of what it would cost here. But for those insured, they are having a hard time deciding what is more important — food, rent, utilities or medical care.
Those with medical bills and medical debt are increasingly facing serious financial problems and sometimes facing trade-offs among immediate life necessities. Thirty-nine percent of those with bill problems or debt say they have used up all of their savings to pay their health care bills; 29 percent are unable to pay for basic necessities like food, heat, or rent; and 30 percent took on credit card debt. Twenty-four percent of adults under age 65 with medical debt owe $4,000 or more and 12 percent owe $8,000 or more in unpaid medical expenses.
Having health insurance does not mean you will get access to good health care if you can’t afford the deductibles in the first place. Having a bare-bones health insurance policy does not mean you will get adequate health care if you bother to look at the exclusions that are quite numerous.
While Teddy, perhaps, would like to believe Obama would move to a single-payer health care system, the same article goes on to say Obama would not do that.
But Obama repeated that he rejects an immediate shift to a single-payer system. “Given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs. You’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up,” he said at a roundtable discussion with women Monday morning after a voter asked, “Why not single payer?”
“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”
Interesting that the insurance industry is “contributing” (buying?) more to McSame. Although the near 50/50 split could mean that the insurance industry is buying their future from Obama.
Russ gets it right, the health care crisis may only get a band-aid this election cycle.
Unfortunately, neither of the two major presidential candidates offers anything close to the significant health care reforms this country needs. McCain is recycling the nonsensical right-wing canard of tax breaks to purchase health insurance, which would amount to either a pittance or nothing for most American workers. Obama’s milquetoast approach would do almost nothing to reduce the ranks of the uninsured, and, like McCain, Obama seems perfectly willing to ignore the underinsured.
Regardless of who wins the White House in November, the mushrooming health care crisis will not be meaningfully addressed anytime soon. The underinsured will get the shaft in 2009, just like they’re getting the shaft today.
Bottom line, people are suffering.
Although medical tourism may not be a solution to our healthcare crisis, it is certainly a viable option for Americans that are suffering in pain and cannot afford the high cost here in the US. More and more people are opting to travel abroad for their procedures and are experience positive outcomes. As this trend becomes more main stream, the American healthcare system will forced to become more competitive.
Yet, many people that are uninsured cannot afford medical tourism. That is why a single-payer system is so desperately needed in this country.
Did you see the Bunk study stating 2/3 of doctors in America want National Health Care. The doctors who did this study also conducted one in 2002 and found that the majority of doctors did not want national health care, the problem with this is that the 2 question surveys drastically differ in their 2nd question. I found this article, 60% of Doctors Surveyed Oppose Switching to a National Health Care Plan, It’s worth a read.