Medical bills drive majority of U.S. bankruptcies

It's no surprise that more than half of US bankruptcies are caused by medical calamities...at least to those of us in the reality-based community. A new study in the American Journal of Medicine puts it in stark terms:

In 2007, before the current economic downturn, an American family filed for bankruptcy in the aftermath of illness every 90 seconds. Most troubling about this statistic is that three-quarters of them were insured, according to the authors. They also found that the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 50 percent between 2001 and 2007.

...

The odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause were 2.38 fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.

And all this data is from before the catastrophic economic downturn of 2008.

I bet the Republicans try to spin this as a massive problem with personal responsibility. Those profligate people shouldn't have contracted all those illnesses!