Exactamundo.
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I have heard the stat before claiming healthcare debt is the #1 reason for bankruptcy and dispute it (see @xerty 's post above). Regardless, I am not asking for proof of that stat, I am asking for a cite that shows that stat changed after the ACA was enacted. That was your claim.
So when you said “poverty”, you actually meant “poverty among people with expensive illnesses without insurance.”? That’s much more specific group, so I suppose you understand my confusion.
What is the current poverty rate among that group and what do you think it will rise to?
You keep referring to past policies as being “worthless” and I wonder why? I use to be happy with my $40/month insurance coverage. It was far from worthless - it was issued by major insurers, and covered everything after the deductible like any other plan. The deductible just happened to be $20,000. Which is exactly what I wanted - to cap my exposure to potential expenses from a catastrophic illness/injury - but can no longer get because folks like you declared them “worthless”. Now I have (until recently, mandated) $400/month premiums for coverage that has benefited me the exact same amount as those past $40 policies ever did…
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~ A study released in 2014 [PDF] by the American Journal of Medicine finds a large increase, almost 20%, in medical bankruptcies between 2001 and 2007. Of all bankruptcies filed in 2007, 62% were tied to medical expenses. Three-quarters of those who filed for bankruptcies in 2007 had health insurance.
(This data from 2007, prior to the financial collapse, meaning the numbers likely became far more bleak in the subsequent seven years.)
~ A study from NerdWallet Health (imagine that), based upon an update of a previous Harvard study, released in 2014, found that three in five bankruptcies in 2014 would be due to medical bills.
“NerdWallet Health chose to include only bankruptcy explicitly tied to medical bills, excluding indirect reasons like lost work opportunities. Thus we conservatively estimated medical bankruptcy rates to be 57.1% (versus the authors’ 62.1%) of US bankruptcies. We also used official bankruptcy statistics, released this month through March 2013, from US Courts.”
That’s not a dispute. (See my post above).
Depends how quickly things collapse back to where they were. There already really isn’t any ACA or “Obamacare” anymore. The GOP can’t cut one leg off a three-legged stool and still call it a stool, and offer that to the American people to sit on to access healthcare.
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Because so many were.
AFAIK you can still purchase high-deductible plans, but of course, if you had read my earlier post, you would have already been aware that was not what I was referencing.
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I’m sure anything with Elizabeth Warran as an author should be dismissed likewise, especially if she’s as flexible with her statistics as she is with her ancestry to get the outcomes she wants, which incidentally includes both your sources below. The Nerdwallet just uses the medical bankruptcy data from the Warran paper, with various tweaks, and hence suffers from the same flaws.
Basically, these studies set out to find medical costs as a primary cause of bankruptcy and did so because they wanted a left wing talking point. Misleading statistics are easy to create - here they asked if medical expenses or illness of the oneself or a family member was “a reason” that contributed to bankruptcy. The fact that the majority of these so called medical bankruptcies involve people with health insurance and have somewhere around $5k in average medical debt (much less than the average total debt) should be clues the real cause lies elsewhere.
Guess what? Credit card debt is “a reason” that contributes to 99% of bankruptcies, because nearly all BK cases involve credit card debt. Apparently the average CC debt in BK is $25k, and somehow that’s less of a problem than the $5-8k of medical debt? Clearly we need to reform the credit card system, right? Here’s a study by debt collectors (who would know), citing the largest debts of BK filers are CCs in about 3/4 of cases, with medical being about 20% (most of the rest).
Asking BK lawyers about their clients suggest that top causes of BK is overspending followed by job loss, with divorce and medical debts much less common.
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For the most part no, they couldn’t still be purchased. The high deductible plans were, as was the whole point, far too profitable due to the relatively low risk of claims.
My point is that all those policies served a purpose and were only “worthless” to people who were dazzled by the low premiums but still expected to get comprehensive coverage no matter what the terms stated.
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I disagree with most, if not all, of your post, but I’m liking it because somehow you and meed were able to get joefriday to actually post a real source which actually purports to substantiate the statements he was making.
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That was quite a feat lol, but I still wasn’t able to get him to post a source for his claim that the ACA brought down the number of healthcare debt bankruptcies.
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Here’s some shaky numbers from the first study @JoeFriday cited. They are difficult to explain if you are being completely honest with the numbers:
- Debtor said medical bills were reason for bankruptcy 29.0%
- Medical bills >$5000 or >10% of annual family income 34.7%
- Mortgaged home to pay medical bills 5.7%
- Medical bill problems (any of above 3) 57.1%
That 57% number includes some overlap, since 29+34+5 is more than 57. But how much overlap should there be? Let’s make a safe assumption. No one would mortgage their home to pay a medical bill that is less than $5,000. So the 5.7% of people that have mortgaged their home all fall into the 34.7% that have medical bills over $5,000. So that means there is only 6.6% overlap between the group of people that say medical bills were the reason for their bankruptcy and the group that says they had over $5,000 in medical bills. This study is trying to say that 22.4% of people that went through bankruptcy AND claimed that medical bills were the reason for their bankruptcy DID NOT HAVE OVER $5,000 in medical debt. If you don’t question the conclusion of this study after reading those numbers, I don’t know what to tell you.
Additionally, this study counts bankruptcies of people that have lost income due to an illness as a medical bankruptcy. That’s fine, but it makes it’s overall number of 62.1% worthless for our discussion here. The ACA is about health insurance, not lost wages insurance. It will not fix the problem of people declaring bankruptcy because of lost income from an illness. The study even says that only 31% of people filing for medical bankruptcy didn’t have insurance at time of filing bankruptcy, which was the same percentage of people filing for non-medical bankruptcy. The only indication that more insurance would help is that 7% more medical bankruptcy households had a lapse in coverage than non medical bankruptcy households. So we’re talking about 7% of people that MIGHT be helped by the ACA.
The only fair number to gather from this study as to the percentage of people that have filed bankruptcy because of medical debt is the self reported “Debtor said medical bills were reason for bankruptcy” number. That is 29%. And the belief that Obamacare would have helped a large number of them avoid bankruptcy is not borne out in the study.
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OK dude WTF does Elizabeth Warren and her ancestry have to do with anything?
Keep the personal political attacks out of it.
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“New England Journal of Medicine published a new estimate done by a team of health and labor economists.”
…
“The fraction of bankruptcies caused by medical events is just 4 percent. And even among those bankruptcies, it seems that medical bills may be less of a problem than the other things associated with an illness, such as lost labor income.”
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The “practical discussion” has turned into a political slugging match.
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Maybe just pointing out that she has the same affliction as most politicians - finding the center line of the truth highway. Just to keep this on topic, AFAIK, none of the insurance plans cover the treatment of that illness.
WSJ showing how the network quality of Obamacare plans has fallen and now no plans include access to many top hospitals. Ironically, Medicaid patients are still accepted at those, so you might actually be better off with that if you have a serious problem.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-can-be-worse-than-medicaid-1530052891
Many of the country’s top hospitals are off limits to patients covered by ObamaCare’s current plans. Take Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, which was named America’s best cancer-care hospital by U.S. News & World Report in 13 of the past 16 years. The hospital’s website suggests that it takes even Medicaid, but it doesn’t accept a single private health-insurance plan sold on the individual market in Texas.
Since Blue Cross of Minnesota withdrew from the individual market in 2016, the state’s Mayo Clinic—once cited by President Obama as a model for the nation—has been off limits to Minnesotans covered by ObamaCare exchange plans. Memorial Sloan Kettering appears out of bounds for every exchange plan in New York. Both of these hospitals are open to some Medicaid patients, though Mayo’s chief executive has predicted publicly that Medicaid patients may eventually have to queue behind their privately insured peers.
The article goes on to discuss Centene, one of the few profitable Obamacare providers, who offers “Medicaid” style bottom of the barrel plans.
the remaining insurers are offering products that look a lot like Medicaid. Centene , a Medicaid contractor, stepped in to pick up more than half the U.S. counties that had no insurer for 2018. Medicaid contractors like this may be the only insurers that can survive in the ObamaCare exchanges.
Centene’s core product is Medicaid managed care. About 90% of its exchange enrollees get premium subsidies, and many rotate in and out of its Medicaid plans.
…yearlong investigation into Medicaid in Texas. The paper uncovered hundreds of cases in which “essential medical care was delayed, denied or not delivered to people with critical health needs.” Many of the insurers that provide Texas’ Medicaid plans offer similar coverage in the ObamaCare exchanges. One of Centene’s subsidiaries has the state’s highest rate of appeals for denials of care under Medicaid, but it offers plans with similar coverage to exchange enrollees.
Since the mandate to buy insurance has dozens of loopholes and has been enforced weakly, millions of healthy people choose to remain uninsured. When they get sick, however, they often enroll and choose the gold and platinum plans with the most generous coverage. These latecomers usually cause insurers to pay out much more in coverage than the insurers receive in premiums and subsidies. Companies like Centene have a solution to that kind of buyer behavior: They don’t offer gold or platinum plans.
What’s the difference between “medicaid style” and medicaid? Because medicaid is pretty comprehensive and cheap for enrollees, I’d love to be able to qualify for Medicaid. What makes these guys’ medicaid-style plans bottom of the barrel?
Their network of doctors often is missing things you might expect, like an ER doc or an anesthesiologist.
Sounds like a great idea. Discuss.
A bit less fraud might help keep down healthcare costs.
The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday announced charges against 601 people including doctors for taking part in healthcare frauds that resulted in over $2 billion in losses and contributed to the nation’s opioid epidemic in some cases.
Remember - if you’re not committing insurance fraud, you’re not getting your money’s worth (and someone else is). 
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Highly misleading, given that a CSR’d silver plan is usually as good as or better than gold on the ACA exchange anyway. So the way they limit cost is to reduce the networks, not by limiting the plans under the ACA.
And this was an opinion piece, not a news article in the WSJ.
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