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.