Originally Posted by Guest

As recently as 1981, only 8 percent of families filing for bankruptcy cited medical reasons. By 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, medical bankruptcy was all-to-common. A 2009 study by Himmelstein et al, published in The American Journal of Medicine, revealed that 62.1% of all bankruptcies had a medical cause.Hospital bills were the largest single out-of-pocket expense for 48.0% of patients, prescription drugs for 18.6%, doctors’ bills for 15.1%, and premiums for 4.1%. The remainder cited expenses such as medical equipment and nursing homes. While hospital costs loomed largest for all diagnostic groups, for about one third of patients with pulmonary, cardiac, or psychiatric illnesses, prescription drugs were the largest expense.The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation recently did a survey and found:

… roughly 20 percent of people under 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison 53 percent of people without health insurance said the same.
A study last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that companies are shifting health care costs to their employees. Workers' share of health insurance premiums for their families rose 83 percent from 2005 to 2015, the survey shows. The amount employees had to pay for deductibles for individual insurance increased 255 percent from 2006 to 2015. The increases are far higher than growth in workers' wages.Medicare, like more and more health plans, leaves lot of expenses for patients to cover, says Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

"The public perception may be that, because Medicare is so popular, it is gold-plated Cadillac coverage," Altman says. "But people who are on Medicare know that those costs can really bite."

Altman says Obamacare has given nearly everyone in the U.S. access to health care. About 89 percent of people now have insurance in some form, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The financial vulnerabilities reflect the high cost of health care in the United States, the most expensive place in the world to get sick.Attachment 66551