In the NY Times today was a not-so-startling story about a study done at Harvard finding that an alarming number of people end up in bankruptcy after they get ill and pile up medical bills they can’t pay. The study says that half the people who end up bankrupt do so for medical reasons.
And most of those were regular working Americans who got sick, lost their jobs because they were sick, then lost their health insurance provided by their job, then lost their house and everything else.
This is of interest to us Minnesotans, of course, because of Governor Pawlenty’s proposal to cut the hell out of medical assistance to people who, for one reason or another, can’t afford private insurance.
Aside from the fact that taking people off insurance will have the obvious deleterious effect on their health, what it will really do is just shift the burden of their care to the counties who run the hospitals who have the emergency rooms where they will end up with pneumonia when they could have gone to a family clinic and got some antibiotics for their mild upper respiratory infection last week when they started feeling ill.
Another leading cause of bankruptcy, according to the story, is gambling addiction. Pawlenty’s other big initiative for this legislative session is expansion of casino gambling so the state can get its cut.
Maybe we can use the profits from the gambling for the welfare of the children whose parents we’re offering two wonderful paths to bankruptcy.
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