'Don't Get Sick. It's Too Expensive': Medical Debt Is Putting More Americans in Financial Crisis
- 'Don’t get sick. It’s too expensive’: medical debt is putting more Americans in financial crisis,' The Guardian, Dec. 11, *2023. [Although both leading presidential candidates have discussed healthcare, neither has directly tackled its biggest issue]
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In a few short months, 37-year-old Kimberly Cooley went from sprinting up stairs to faltering after several steps. Unbeknownst to her, she was experiencing a cascade of symptoms related to autoimmune hepatitis, a rare and chronic inflammation of the liver. She was diagnosed, shot to the top of the liver transplant list, and quickly realized she could not handle the financial repercussions of such a surgery alone.
A private person by nature, Cooley took the extraordinary step of publicizing her condition – a step she understood well as a marketing consultant. In a matter of days, her loved ones raised more than $17,000 for her liver transplant surgery. “I did have the support of friends and family,” said Cooley, 42, who lives in rural Duck Hill, Mississippi. “So it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.” Cooley is doing well. But her finances are another story.
She is more than $4,000 in debt to AccessOne, a private-equity backed medical credit card company.
As transplant patients need ongoing medication and care, she expects that debt to roughly double next year. “I start referring to it as ‘transplant life’,” said Cooley. “Things are going to pop up, and that’s just part of it.” As a new year and presidential election approach, Americans face a worsening crisis: the affordability of healthcare. More Americans than ever, about 92%, now have health insurance – and simultaneously face enormous bills. Over the last decade, insurers and employers have pushed more cost-sharing onto individuals and families.
Now, squeezed by medical costs and inflation, more than 100 million Americans have medical debt and roughly the same proportion report avoiding a prescription because of it. Sara Collins, a health policy scholar and vice-president at the Commonwealth Fund, said “those are the trends we’ve seen”, referring to “growth in healthcare costs, household incomes that haven’t kept pace with those costs, and employers’ use of increased cost-sharing”. Cooley’s story represents the intersecting issues that plague the health system, as high prices and a push to offload those costs to patients collide.
Those trends are all still there, they haven’t changed, and unless they’re addressed”, problems will continue, added Collins...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/11/medical-debt-healthcare-affordability-inflation