Bankrupt

In this great nation, we had over 6,000 bankruptcy filings a day, every business day in May for a total of more than 120,000.  We are potentially on track for between 1,393,000 and 1,487,000 filings in 2009. Talk about trends everyone hopes will be broken. And the data seems to indicate that we’re nowhere near the end of this “recession.”

And remember, it’s harder to declare bankruptcy now than it was a few years ago thanks to “reform.” It makes you wonder how bad things might otherwise be.

Further, a follow-up study of 2007 bankruptcies shows that matters are even worse than they were in 2001. In 62.1% of bankruptcies, medical bills were a major factor (a rise of 49% since the original report in 2001). In 1981, only 8% of bankruptcies involved an illness. More:

Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.

Even apparently well-insured families often faced high out-of-pocket medical costs for co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services. Medically bankrupt families with private insurance reported medical bills that averaged $17,749 vs. $26,971 for the uninsured. High costs – averaging $22,568 – were incurred by those who initially had private coverage but lost it in the course of their illness.

For review, almost 2 out of every 3 bankruptcies is due to medical debt, over 3 out of 4 of those people had health insurance, and they still reported medical bills totalling more than the cost a brand new, decent sedan. That means most of us are one serious illness away from our own personal bankruptcy. We’ve got many people who can’t afford to fill prescriptions. It’s getting harder to get in to see a doctor, at all (go ahead, call your local doc and ask when you can come in for a routine checkup). People are falling for scams that they think are health insurance, but are in fact nothing more than an expensive coupon club. And insurers have taken some time out for self-examination. How meditative.

What stands out in this chart of the age of uninsured individuals? Could it be the fact that almost nobody over 65 is uninsured? Do you think that’s a coincidence? Or just maybe is it because there is a government program to ensure that they are insured.

Yet the last thing in the world the insurance industry wants is for the rest of us to have access to a plan like Medicare. They want to saddle it with “triggers“, a term that coincidentally gives us insight into what they really want — to kill the plan or any chance it has at success. Even the President has offered us a mandatory insurance plan instead of the true universal plan We The People want and need.

The private health insurance system has failed. It can reinvent itself as an industry that provides supplemental coverages. This is not the time for half-baked compromises that benefit insurance companies over human beings. A true single payer system is the only way to stop medical bankruptcies, truly control costs, and move forward. It will even create jobs and boost the economy.

In know it’s only sort of related, but I want to make sure nobody forgets about Anti-Abortion Terrorists: *itch PhD on the reporting; the ever cautious and relatively unbiased Christian Science Monitor on the terrorist’s suspected extremist ties; Incertus on the importance of access to abortion; CNN on the charges, which don’t (yet?) include terrorism; many people have pointed out that if local law enforcement had done something radical like enforce the law, this guy would have already been in jail instead of committing acts of terrorism; how quickly some people forget that “abortion doctors” are also “obstetricians”, and how traditional to attempt to stone a perceived “slut”; be on the lookout next year for more violence on May 31; more stories that should make you cry; are the terrorists the mainstream in the so-called-pro-life movement?; is the manufacture of terrorists the goal?; Make no mistake, this is part of a Global War Against Women. No, I’m not being overly dramatic. This is serious stuff.

In Closing: Fun with Science; if a company in India thinks they can sell a 4 seat, 65 MPG car in the United States for less than any car currently in our market, what exactly is the Big 3’s excuse?; funny how this peice on lobbyists getting Congress to change the financial rules arrived the same day as a mailing form Public Citizen, concerned that corporations were writing their own rules in Congress; the ex CEO of Countrywide will be charged by the SEC for insider trading and fraud; Elvis Bin Laden; two bits of Japanfilter, it’s the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway and 100 books for understanding contemporary Japan; and judges are also at risk from right-wing domestic terrorists.