Medical problems contributed to 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies, a figure that is virtually unchanged since before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to a study published yesterday as an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health. The findings indicate that 530,000 families suffer bankruptcies each year that are linked to illness or medical bills. The study, carried out by Dr. David U. Himmelstein, Profs. Robert M. Lawless, Pamela Foohey, Deborah Thorne, a sociologist from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, surveyed a random sample of 910 Americans who filed for personal bankruptcy between 2013 and 2016, and abstracted the court records of their bankruptcy filings. These figures are similar to findings from the CBP’s medical bankruptcy surveys in 2001 and 2007, which were authored by three researchers in the current study (Himmelstein, Thorne, and Woolhandler), and then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. The current study found no evidence that the ACA reduced the proportion of bankruptcies driven by medical problems: 65.5 percent of debtors cited a medical contributor to their bankruptcy in the period prior to the ACA’s implementation as compared to 67.5 percent in the three years after the law came into effect.
