Medically Pressed to Death

Mills River Progressive, because you're neither General Motors nor unscrupulous financial institutions.

Brief citation:

The financial elite have been allowed to utterly fuck over American citizens with unethical, deceptive, usurious practices, and congress has facilitated that process; spending its time instead on the big issues, like steroids in baseball and a split-second flash of Janet Jackson's nipple on teevee.

[...]

Medical problems contributed to nearly two-thirds (62.1 percent) of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the August issue of the American Journal of Medicine that will be published online Thursday. The data were collected prior to the current economic downturn and hence likely understate the current burden of financial suffering. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6 percent. The authors' previous 2001 findings have been widely cited by policy leaders, including President Obama.
Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.

It would not surprise me if people in medicine were for single payer, by the way.

ETA:  Op-ed in the Boston Globe by an actual doctor, by way of The Sideshow, who got it from Cab Drollery.

One would think that doctors would have gotten together and made it clear that they do the work. Without doctors, there is no healthcare. In a theater when someone collapses, has anyone ever heard the call go out: "Is there an insurance executive in the house?" If doctors had stuck together they could have prevented the abuses they're now are battling.

The issue isn't that primary-care doctors get paid less than cardiac surgeons, but that the system of healthcare rests on insurance companies and their CEOs making huge profits. No amount of cost-cutting can save enough money to support a for-profit system. The only solution is a universal, government-run healthcare system.

Emphasis mine.