Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check
Another misquote of facts by Obama. His teams penchant for pushing facts around to match their views are a technique of local/small time politics. They aren’t used to having the stories checked by more than one or two reporters. And if they did get caught, their rhetoric could usually drown out the one or two papers that were causing them a problem. But at this level they should have realized by now that everything the POTUS says is double checked. Apparently that has not caught on yet. Even ABC news is now checking out Obama’s facts.
“Facts…..we don’t need no stinking facts….”
“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds,” Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.
The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.
and later on in the article.
Moreover, Harvard’s definition of “medical” expenses includes situations that aren’t necessarily medical in common parlance, e.g., a gambling problem, or the death of a family member. If your main wage-earning spouse gets hit by a bus and dies, and you have to file, that’s included as a “medical bankruptcy.”
When I asked the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, about his definitions of medical bankruptcy back in 2005, he said, “It’s a judgment call,” and added that any death, for example, “to our mind is a medical event.”
article at http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2009/03/medical-bankrup.html
