Bankruptcy and medical expenses in America

You'd have thought that anybody with even only half a brain and an ounce of commonsense would have immediately smelt a rat about claims that 70% - yes, that's right, fully 70% - of personal bankruptcies in the USA are the result of medical expenses.   Seventy percent? Seems a jolly high number.   Couldn't possibly be that there might be some ideological and political agendas lurking behind that number? Elizabeth Warren and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Utterly Misleading Bankruptcy Study 04 Jun 2009 04:21 pm   Elizabeth Warren has another study out showing that medical expenses contribute to more than half of all bankruptcies--indeed, this time, it's 70%, up from the 50% she found in 2001.  Now, it is possible that this is true.  The fact that it seems to disagree with every other study I've ever read that is not authored by Elizabeth Warren, and also, the self-reports of the people in her study (only about a third of whom attribute their bankruptcy to a health problem) could just be a fluke.  It doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong.   Yet upon closer examination, it turns out that it is not just wrong, but actively, aggressively wrong.  Warren and her co-authors have obscured important and obvious facts that call the integrity of the work into serious question.   Full article here Megan McArdle

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