Elizabeth Warren describes medical bills as “the leading cause of personal bankruptcy” in the United States. She bases that opinion in part on her own research, in which she and her collaborators surveyed people who had experienced personal bankruptcy, asked them whether they’d experienced health-related financial distress, and concluded that 60 percent of all bankruptcies in the U.S. result from illness or injury.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine this spring convincingly argued that Warren’s estimates were seriously exaggerated due to faulty research methods. I’ll briefly summarize that critique. But more importantly, I’ll explain why even revised bankruptcy estimates still overstate the contribution of health care costs to American bankruptcy rates.
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