The idea that half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical debt has become part of the common folklore.  But where did the idea come from?  What is the evidence for it?  The claim, first made in a 2005 Health Affairs article, is at variance with four decades of economic research, including a finding that even large medical bills have no impact on family living standards. Continue reading Medical Bankruptcy Myths →

Kudos to Victor Fuchs for a JAMA article (which unfortunately is gated) and to Fuchs and Ezekiel Emanuel in a Chicago Tribune editorial that says much the same thing.  Economic statistics show what common sense should have told us anyway: health insurance and other employee benefits come at the expense of money wages.  Far from be being a gift from employers, health insurance is "paid for" by employees and health cost increases are the primary reason for stagnating wage growth.

A Canadian woman with ovarian cancer faced treatment delays in Canada.  So she crossed the border and had life-saving surgery in Michigan, just in the nick of time.  On return, she faced a six-week wait for chemotherapy.  So she went back to the U.S. for chemo as well.  The Canadian government won’t pay the bills.  The reason:  the woman didn’t fill out the right forms in a timely manner.

In our Handbook on State Health Reform, we created vignettes to show how much better life would be in a reformed health care system.  The Commonwealth Fund liked our idea so much they copied it for Karen Davis' Message in the latest CWF Annual Report.  (Minus my writing panache and witty sense of humor, of course.)  

The big difference: In the CWF vignettes there are no economic incentives, no patient power, no doctor power, no markets, no entrepreneurs and certainly no capitalists.  In Karen's world, supervised by benevolent government bureaucrats who always make the right decisions, good things just happen to good people.  Why didn't I think of that?

Gene Steuerle once again makes more sense than most other people, either on the right or the left, trotting out a proposal he and I made years ago:

Clinton may be suggesting more of a commandment than she can enforce, Obama less of an inducement than he can provide … Let me offer my solution (again!) for one enforceable way to extend "mandates" … [T]he federal government could make the $1,000 per child credit, which most taxpayers receive, available only for those who buy insurance for their children. To extend the mandate further down the income scale, I would beef up and extend the credit to those not eligible. This method of denying public benefits is more easily enforced than trying to run around and knock on doors to collect sizable sums of money.

(See Gene Steuerle, Clinton Versus Obama on Health Mandates.)

This is an interesting posting from Jonah Goldberg on The National Review's Corner blog:

Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.  Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.  The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls.

Doctors warned last night that the practice of "patient-stacking" was putting patients' health at risk.  Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that last year 43,576 patients waited longer than one hour before being let into emergency units.