[thephyber]

You aren’t being creative enough.

Health insurance companies know about the annual caps and have strong incentives to deny as many costs as uncovered as possible. The out-of-pocket maximums only apply to covered costs. There are lots of costs that health insurance companies deny coverage for: - Incidents that the covered think are emergencies, but the insurer thinks aren’t. - Any time the insured doesn’t follow the policy procedures, such as visiting a specialist without first getting a recommendation from their primary care physician - Out of network providers. - Claims received after the insurer says the policy is cancelled

And there are dozens of reasons related to ineptitude (bad coding, mistyping, lack of cost transparency).

a blog article listing the top 10 types: https://mbamedical.com/blog/8-reasons-why-your-insurance-cla...

[0xBDB]

That's true, though as another comment in this thread points out I still don't think the math works. But also it doesn't seem to be what that study found:

"A new study from academic researchers found that 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues —either because of high costs for care or time out of work. An estimated 530,000 families turn to bankruptcy each year because of medical issues and bills, the research found."

So to compare the U.S. to Europe we'd need to know how many are due to bills, which only really happens in the U.S., and how many are due to being out of work due to medical issues, which happens everywhere and apparently causes 8.2% of bankruptcies in the U.K., for example.

https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...