A Harvard study last year found half of all bankruptcies were the result of illness or medical bills.
It got plenty of attention as the first large-scale study of medical
bankruptcy and because it reinforced the story that health care is too
expensive and that employers or the government needed to help more. Gail Heriot and others at the time critiqued the study, noting that “only 27 percent of the surveyed debtors had unreimbursed medical
expenses exceeding $1,000 over the course of the two years prior to
their bankruptcy.”
Now a new critique by researchers at the Kellogg School of Management
finds that medical expenses contribute to less than one-fifth of
bankruptcies. Let’s see if it gets as big of headlines as the recent low-fat-diet debunkng did.
