[TMWNN]

>> According to a study published in February 2019, about 530,000 bankruptcies filed annually are because of debt accrued due to a medical illness.

That's the same bogus study that Elizabeth Warren has been pushing for years, which attributes any bankruptcy in which medical bills are involved to mean that medical bills caused the bankruptcy. Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.

[thephyber]

You bring an interesting point. I completely admit that I didn’t research the source of the study or any refutations of it.

> The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.

An obvious counter observation: Isn’t an extended medical issue likely to cause a person to lose their job and health insurance?

Remember that in the USA most health insurance is company sponsored. When you lose your job, you either pay premiums at COBRA rates or you lose coverage.

And although it is illegal, companies do fire people (or find creative substitutes) for employees who are very expensive to cover.

[TMWNN]

>An obvious counter observation: Isn’t an extended medical issue likely to cause a person to lose their job and health insurance?

You are correct in that most US health insurance is tied to employment. But the discussion point was the claim that "[insert high percentage here] of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills".

Any illness, extended long enough, is going to cause people to lose their jobs, whether in the US or elsewhere. Certainly any illness long enough to exhaust COBRA coverage. That said, in the US that's where Medicaid will step in, assuming that the loss of income is sufficient to trigger Medicaid's income-based eligibility.

[thephyber]

If you have an illness long enough to lose your job and your health insurance, you probably aren’t able to pay all of your bills. Hence medical bills are likely a distal cause.

[TMWNN]

Right. But, again, a) the job loss is going to happen anywhere, in or out of the US, and b) having medical bills among the debts one can't pay without a job is not the same thing as "American with job gets hangnail = bankruptcy!!!", which is what one would believe based on the typical rhetoric on the subject.