How health care affects our wallets locally and why it needs to change : Steve Gara

Below is a case study on one of just a million reasons on why the country's health care system needs some radical change. It was actually an excerpt taken from President Obama's site concerning health care reform and I hope that by reading it, we can all figure out that it doesn't take much to "teeter" on the edge of bankruptcy to pay medical bills. No other industrialized country in the world would do this to its citizens, so why do we do that?
Medical Bankruptcy: A South Florida case study

Americans across the country are struggling to keep up with rising costs of medical bills, high deductibles, increasing premiums, and the escalating costs of prescription drugs. For some Americans health care costs result in medical bankruptcy. According to a new Harvard University study, 62% of bankruptcies in 2007 were caused by medical-related debt. Today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel highlights the case of Dorothy Carmona, a self-employed cancer patient who had to file for bankruptcy as a result of economic downturn and exorbitant health care bills.

Self-employed with no health insurance, Dorothy Carmona began descending into debt in 2004 when she had a stroke. Next, the housing crash ruined her title business. Then last fall she was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer.
It all came to a head this month. With a lender about to foreclose on her Pembroke Pines townhouse and years of medical bills now making up more than half the $125,000 she owes other creditors, Carmona filed for bankruptcy. Days later she learned the cancer had worsened.

"It's been one nightmare after another," said Carmona, 48, a single mother whose teenage daughter lives at home. "I'm ruined. I have nothing. They tell me I have five months to live. Right now I'm in a frightened mode. I don't know what's going to happen to me."

Carmona is the face of a growing national issue: Health care costs are driving people to financial ruin. The problem fuels a push to extend medical coverage to the roughly 50 million uninsured and under-insured Americans. A Harvard University study this month found that 62 percent of U.S. bankruptcy cases in 2007 were caused by or inflamed by medical bills. That's up from 50 percent in 2001 and 8 percent in 1981.



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