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Personal bankruptcies are down 50% since the ACA went into effect.

Dittohead not!

Dittohead not!

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How the Affordable Care Act Drove Down Personal Bankruptcy


As legislators and the executive branch renew their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act this week, they might want to keep in mind a little-known financial consequence of the ACA: Since its adoption, far fewer Americans have taken the extreme step of filing for personal bankruptcy.
Filings have dropped about 50 percent, from 1,536,799 in 2010 to 770,846 in 2016 (see chart, below). Those years also represent the time frame when the ACA took effect. Although courts never ask people to declare why they’re filing, many bankruptcy and legal experts agree that medical bills had been a leading cause of personal bankruptcy before public healthcare coverage expanded under the ACA. Unlike other causes of debt, medical bills are often unexpected, involuntary, and large.
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So, let's repeal it and see if bankruptcies go back up. It's a social experiment, after all.
 
A lot has happened in the economy since 2010 . . .
 
Correlation doesn't imply causation:

correlation_greece_facebook.png
 
Of course they went down.

With interest rates so incredibly low and the government pouring trillions of dollars is debt money into the economy PLUS the Fed throwing trillions of dollars (they don't have either) at the stock markets PLUS the government bailing everyone out...you would have to be almost galactically stupid to actually have to declare bankruptcy over the past decade or so. It is INCREDIBLY easy to get cheap credit. I cannot tell you how many credit cards I have been 'pre-approved' for in the last 10 years.

However, by making the economy 'foolproof' - they have also made it relatively stagnant and hurt the middle class big time.

Food stamp usage is up about 60% since the 'Great Recession' began and is actually up since 2010.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf

And the M2 money velocity is falling hard and is now the lowest EVER recorded...which means people are not spending their money. And usually when the velocity is down, it means there is a recession.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

And the home ownership rate has collapsed.

United States Home Ownership Rate | 1965-2017 | Data | Chart | Calendar

And the wealth gap keeps getting worse and worse. All that cheap government debt does not go mostly to the poor/middle classes. It mostly goes to the wealthy.


Sure people are not declaring bankruptcies as often...as they are able to carry gigantic amounts of low interest debt. But they also are not prospering very much either.
 
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phattonez said:
A lot has happened in the economy since 2010 . . .
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The many experts we interviewed also pointed to two other contributing factors: an improving economy and changes to bankruptcy laws in 2005 that made it more difficult and costly to file. However, they almost all agreed that expanded health coverage played a major role in the marked, recent decline.

The article isn't saying the ACA is the sole cause. However, it probably is a major cause, as a high percentage of bankruptcies in the US involve medical issues.

E.g. One day, you're working and everything's fine. Then, you get sick, and it turns out you have cancer. You can't work, so you lose your job, which eventually results in your losing health insurance, which results in mounting medical bills, that eventually you can't pay off. Lo and behold, you end up in bankruptcy court.

The article talks further about the complexities of bankruptcies -- and how bankruptcies in Massachusetts is lower than other parts of the US, because Romneycare resulted in significantly less medical-related debt.

“The average medical debt in Massachusetts in 2013 was relatively low at just $3,041 (6 percent of total unsecured debt) compared to $8,594 (20 percent of total unsecured debt) nationwide,” Austin writes in his 2014 study, portions of which were published in the Maine Law Review.

“Only about 9 percent of Massachusetts debtors felt their bankruptcy filing was a result of medical bills,” Austin explains. “This compares to 25 percent for debtors from [other] jurisdictions.”

Plus, starting in 2011, the CDC ran an annual survey of households if they have problems making payments for medical bills. That number has dropped steadily every year since.

Maybe you ought to read the article before you criticize it. Just a thought.
 
Fishking said:
It should be repealed and replaced with a form of Medicare for all supported via a flat % income tax for everyone. Single payer is one of the few areas where I've come over to the lefty side of the aisle.
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That is what Trump promised - everyone covered.
 
jaeger19 said:
We have already dealt with this. Medical bills are not the cause of medical bankruptcy..

Personal bankruptcies are down because the economy has begun to recover from 2010 to 2016. \

Come on Dittohead...!
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Medical bills aren't the cause of medical bankruptcy? Really?
Read my link, then get back to me.
 
Fishking said:
It should be repealed and replaced with a form of Medicare for all supported via a flat % income tax for everyone. Single payer is one of the few areas where I've come over to the lefty side of the aisle.
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I will go even further than you.

I have always had this conundrum about healthcare being for profit to begin with.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Medical bills aren't the cause of medical bankruptcy? Really?
Read my link, then get back to me.
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Yes...they aren't.. and we have been over this:

This past year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) responded to a request by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) by examining 5,203 bankruptcy cases from the files of the U.S. Trustee Program. The filings occurred between 2000 and 2002, the same time frame as the filings studied by Himmelstein and colleagues. The DOJ reported that 90 percent of filers had medical debt of less than $5,000. Of those reporting medical debts, those debts accounted for only 13 percent of total unsecured debt.
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Dittohead not! said:
They studied a few over five thousand out of more than a million and a half. Wow, that's what, about three tenths of one percent.
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Yes.. and it was found to statistically significant. What really is the cause of medical bankruptcy is not high medical bills.. its either other debt or the loss of income.

Here is some more:

Using data from a 1996 panel survey that included information about household bankruptcy filings, Fay and colleagues employed multivariate probit regression to determine the contributing factors. Among those factors were whether the household head or spouse experienced health problems in the previous year. Controlling for debt levels, Fay and colleagues found no statistical link between bankruptcies and health problems. This finding is consistent with the idea that medical debt is like any other debt—a cause but not the most important cause of bankruptcy. They conclude that bankruptcy is the response to an accumulation of debt, not to one particular factor such as a health problem.
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Maybe we should look at Canada for comparable years. (years in which Canada bankruptcy laws looked like the US and the economies were comparable)

As for the notion that greater government involvement in health insurance will reduce bankruptcy, it is helpful to compare personal bankruptcy rates in the United States and Canada. Unlike the United States, Canada has a universal, government-run health insurance system. Following the logic of Himmelstein and colleagues, we should therefore expect to observe a lower rate of personal bankruptcy in Canada compared to the United States.

Yet the evidence shows that in the only comparable years, personal bankruptcy rates were actually higher in Canada. Personal bankruptcy filings as a percentage of the population were 0.20 percent in the United States during 2006 and 0.27 percent in 2007. In Canada, the numbers are 0.30 percent in both 2006 and 2007. The data are from government sources and defined in similar ways for both countries and cover the time period after the legal reforms to U.S. bankruptcy laws in 2005 and before the onset of the 2008 economic recession.
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Dittohead not! said:
That is what Trump promised - everyone covered.
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Everyone is going to have "ACCESS" to healthcare. Which means your insurance premiums could be $25,000 a year or you get the Bush universal healthcare choice. The emergency room.
 
Hari Seldon said:
Everyone is going to have "ACCESS" to healthcare. Which means your insurance premiums could be $25,000 a year or you get the Bush universal healthcare choice. The emergency room.
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If your income is $25,000 a year, and your health insurance costs are the same, then you either don't have access to health care, or you don't have access to food.
 
jaeger19 said:
Yes.. and it was found to statistically significant. What really is the cause of medical bankruptcy is not high medical bills.. its either other debt or the loss of income.

Here is some more:



Maybe we should look at Canada for comparable years. (years in which Canada bankruptcy laws looked like the US and the economies were comparable)
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Statistically significant? With such a small sample, and so many variables? Doesn't seem like it would be. Let's take a look at another study:

They concluded that 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10 percent of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness. On average, medically bankrupt families had $17,943 in out-of-pocket expenses, including $26,971 for those who lacked insurance and $17,749 who had insurance at some point.
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Dittohead not! said:
If your income is $25,000 a year, and your health insurance costs are the same, then you either don't have access to health care, or you don't have access to food.
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You realize I was being sarcastic?

Sent from my VS990 using Tapatalk
 
Dittohead not! said:
Statistically significant? With such a small sample, and so many variables? Doesn't seem like it would be. Let's take a look at another study:
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Yes.. thanks for the link:

From you link:

They concluded that 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10 percent of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness
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Also from your link:

However, Peter Cunningham, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington, D.C., isn't completely convinced. He says it's often hard to tell in which cases medical bills add to the bleak financial picture without being directly responsible for the bankruptcies.

"I'm not sure that it is correct to say that medical problems were the direct cause of all of these bankruptcies," he says. "In most of these cases, it's going to be medical expenses and other things, other debt that is accumulating."
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jaeger19 said:
Yes.. thanks for the link:

From you link:



Also from your link:
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My wife files Chapter 7 bankruptcies on a regular basis and her coworker files chapter 13 regularly (although less often than 7s, due to the lower socio-economic status of clients in the area). Many of them are poor financial decisions but many of them are due to health care costs which cannot be afforded. Heck, I have a good friend whose parents had to declare bankruptcy because their daughter was sick and it racked up massive health care costs.

As to what percentage medical bills cause a family to file bankruptcy, I cannot say. All I do know is people do file bankruptcy because of medical bills and it's not an uncommon thing. Perhaps I'm not fully understanding your position, but it appeared to me as if you were suggesting it's rare.
 
Slyfox696 said:
My wife files Chapter 7 bankruptcies on a regular basis and her coworker files chapter 13 regularly (although less often than 7s, due to the lower socio-economic status of clients in the area). Many of them are poor financial decisions but many of them are due to health care costs which cannot be afforded. Heck, I have a good friend whose parents had to declare bankruptcy because their daughter was sick and it racked up massive health care costs.

As to what percentage medical bills cause a family to file bankruptcy, I cannot say. All I do know is people do file bankruptcy because of medical bills and it's not an uncommon thing. Perhaps I'm not fully understanding your position, but it appeared to me as if you were suggesting it's rare.
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My position is that while people file for medical bankruptcy.. actual medical bills are a small percentage of their overall debt.. and its not medical debt that actually makes them seek bankruptcy (in the vast majority of cases). Statistics show that for people that file for bankruptcy medical debt actual comprises a low percentage of their overall debt.
Now.. loss of income from a medical problem is really the factor when it comes to declaring bankruptcy and medical reasons.


The last thing any medical provider wants to do is push someone toward bankruptcy. In a bankruptcy, its likely that we don't get any of our bills paid, and if some is paid its pennies on the dollar because its treated as unsecured debt.

Studies that compare apples to apples with Canada.. (when they had the same bankruptcy laws and the economics where similar) show that during that time Canada had the same bankruptcy rate or lower than the US. .despite having universal healthcare coverage.

Its a myth that people are being "bankrupted by high medical bills" on any regular basis. They are either suffering from the loss of income from being sick.. or citing the reason for bankruptcy as high medical bills because its socially acceptable rather than admit to other large amounts of debt.
 
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