JustOneMinute has a great post on medical bills and bankruptcy. They take note of an advocacy study intended to form opinion, not report facts, and point out that
even if it is true that people who go bankrupt had serious medical problems first, it does not follow that everyone with a serious medical problem goes bankrupt.
Maybe so. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that everyone with a serious medical problem does go bankrupt. What’s wrong with that?
My husband had cancer twenty years ago. He “should” have died of it. At one point, the doctors told the family to prepare for that eventuality. But MD Anderson treated him and within a year he was in remission. This was expensive, especially because his employer’s self-funded health insurance plan quickly folded under the weight of my husband’s cancer. We made payments for years, and eventually (and unasked) the hospital wrote off the balance. But let’s imagine for a minute that they did not. What if, twenty years later, we were still making payments? Wasn’t my husband’s life worth it? But even if he had died, would that have reduced the man-hours, the costs of medicine and supplies, and the maintenance of the hospital infrastructure from which he benefited? No. The value of the services he received would have been the same, regardless of the outcome.
Is there something morally wrong about being required to pay for services we willingly received? It’s far more morally wrong to have people throw in the towel and just refuse to pay, but even that is an option that society chooses to accept via bankruptcy laws. Now even that is evidently not good enough for our Veruca Salt nation.
I really don’t understand why people are buying into the idea that it’s some massive, morally unsound, unfair burden to pay for the medical services that they willingly received. It’s entirely fair. You asked for those services, you accepted them, and now you need to quit whingeing and pay up.
Added: Patterico is on this, too.
Asserting that medical bills are involved in more than 60% of American bankruptcies, researchers from Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University are doing their part to help Barack Obama get nationalized health care
