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    Repiglican Roast

    A spirited discussion of public policy and current issues

    Name:
    Location: The mouth of being

    I'm furious about my squandered nation.

    Thursday, August 24, 2006

    26 years of right wing governance

    Health-care debts typically play a role in about half of the approximately 1.5 million bankruptcies filed in the United States each year, according to Harvard researchers Elizabeth Warren and David U. Himmelstein. And, like the Jacksons, 75 percent of those who declare medical bankruptcy have health insurance at the onset of the illness that failed to prevent them from being pushed over the financial edge, according to the Harvard research.
    [...]
    "With each passing year, the coverage people are receiving requires more in premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs ... Employer-provided coverage is increasingly requiring workers to pay larger portions of the costs and provides fewer benefits."
    [...]
    Today, 46 million Americans are uninsured. And 53 percent of adults who were uninsured at any time during 2005 reported medical debt or bill problems, according to a Commonwealth Fund Health Insurance survey this spring. But medical debt is not limited to the uninsured. One fifth of working-age adults, both insured and uninsured, currently have medical debt they're paying off over time

    (those covered under state Medicaid programs are not counted in the numbers of uninsured, even though they are not insured within the private health care system so vigorously promoted, defended and profited from by the right wing, so ought to be counted as uninsured for purposes of a discussion such as this).

    1 Comments:

    Blogger CountryDew said...

    The health care system in this country is terrible, and terribly unfair. If you have money, you live longer, but I don't see statistics discussion that. I know people (like me) who are switching to alternative health care in part because much of it is outside the system. At least you feel like someone cares if you live or die, not whether or not you have a lot in your checkbook.

    2:24 PM  

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