“Even people with health insurance are not insured against the economic consequences of poor health.”Īnd this is part of what Sanders is targeting with his proposal. “Health insurance still leaves Americans exposed to much more economic risk from poor health,” Amy Finkelstein, an economics professor at MIT who has studied medical debt, told me, especially compared to other countries with social insurance that better protect their citizens from the economic loss in the event of sickness or injury. There is certainly some level of agreement that medical debt is a problem unusually endemic in the United States and our safety net should be better structured to address it. Bernie Sanders has put out a plan to eliminate $81 billion in medical debt But even health insurance does not always provide security against financial stress because poor health takes its toll in other ways, such as lost wages. Millions of Americans still lack health insurance, and they’re fully liable for their medical bills if they get sick or have an accident. And even if they don’t go bankrupt, millions more people struggle with this type of debt on their personal ledgers, making it harder for them to borrow money and stay financially stable. There is no denying that thousands of Americans go bankrupt entirely or partly because of medical debt.
It also risks losing sight of the underlying problem.
It is a debate about causation and study design that frankly won’t matter to most people. The Washington Post’s in-house fact-checkers dinged him for saying 500,000 people go bankrupt because of medical debt every year, stirring up an old scholarly fight that originated with a 2005 paper co-authored, in a fun twist, by Sanders’s now-rival Elizabeth Warren.Īcademics have been debating since that 2005 paper’s publication how many people actually go bankrupt in the United States because of medical bills. He has also, because he regularly cites the 500,000 medical bankruptcies figure, reignited a longstanding debate about the actual scale of the medical bankruptcy problem. It’s another big health care promise from Sanders, who campaigns on Medicare-for-all, a national health insurance program that would cover every American. Through a proposed public credit registry, which would replace credit reporting agencies like Equifax, Sanders would prohibit debts from medical care from counting against a person’s credit score.
He would also place restrictions on how aggressive health care providers and debt collectors could be in collecting payments from patients. Under the Sanders plan, the federal government would negotiate and pay off unpaid medical obligations that have already been put out to debt collection agencies. “I am sick and tired of seeing over 500,000 Americans declare bankruptcy each year because they cannot pay off the outrageous cost of a medical emergency or a hospital stay,” Sanders said recently, while teasing the plan he has now formally laid out. Sanders released a plan on Saturday to pay off $81 billion in existing medical debt, reform the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, and set up a public credit registry. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of the leading progressives in the 2020 presidential race, says he wants to eliminate all Americans’ medical debt. Americans go bankrupt every year because of unpaid medical bills.
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