Bankruptcy bill hackery
Posted by Thomas Nephew on March 16th, 2005
One Gail Heriot recently made a startling claim at the National Review Online:
“Half of Bankruptcy Due to Medical Bills — US Study.” At least so said the Reuters headline in last week’s story. And similar stories in newspapers across the country agree. Soon it will be repeated as gospel on Capitol Hill and by the chattering classes everywhere. Understandably, middle-class Americans have started to feel a little queasy about their health and about the adequacy of their health insurance.
The fundamental problem is that it isn’t true. Despite what the authors have encouraged us to believe, the Harvard study, entitled “Illness and Injuries As Contributors to Bankruptcy,” isn’t really about medical bills, crushing or otherwise.
Heriot sniffs that it’s not about medical bills, it’s “about bankruptcies that can — at least if you’re willing to stretch things a bit — be classified as medically related.” But it turns out it’s not much of a stretch. Here’s the table directly from the study — quite accurately titled “Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy” — by David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler:
So the “[a]bout half cited medical causes” claim — that is, what the authors point out, not what Reuters headlined — rests on several other causes, and not just medical bills. I suppose you can argue a bit about gambling, some about drugs, a bit less about births and deaths. But you really can’t argue that a bankruptcy is some kind of evidence of fiscal fecklessness if the person involved can’t pay their bills because they’re out of work for medical reasons. That’s “medical” leading to “bankruptcy,” however the lawyerly Ms. Heriot may wish to split hairs for readers of National Review or her blog. And you’ll search in vain for that 21.3% figure anywhere in Ms. Heriot’s article.
Unfortunately, bloggers like the popular and sometimes incisive Tom Maguire have relayed Heriot’s spectacularly stupid analysis to an even wider readership. I imagine they were simply taking a hack at her word without having a look for themselves.
Category: Post. Tags: bankruptcy, health care.
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