2005 Year in Review: Health Affairs’ 25 Most-Read Articles
Health Affairs
December 28, 2005 (e-mail)
In 2005, Health Affairs’ Web readership topped 9 million pageviews. The article on medical bankruptcy by David Himmelstein and colleagues of Harvard University tops the list with nearly 70,000 viewings. Each of the top 10 papers were viewed over 20,000 times during the time period.
1. David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler, Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy Health Affairs 24 (2005): w63-w73 (published online 2 February 2005; 10.1377/hlthaff.w5.63).
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.
w5.63v1
(article accessible for two weeks)
Top 25 Papers for 2005:
http://www.healthaffairs.org/Top25_2005.php
Comment: The bankruptcy article has redefined the most important flaw in our system of funding health care in the United States. Until now, the problem has been framed largely as an impairment of affordability and access for the 46 million without insurance coverage, but the remaining 85% of us with coverage were not thought to be directly affected. This article showed that average-income individuals who develop medical problems (potentially anyone) may suffer severe financial hardship in spite of having health insurance.
Thus the flaw we must address is not merely the failure to expand our insurance products to cover the uninsured; the fundamental flaw is in the structure of our insurance system which fails to provide financial security and ensure affordable access for each and every individual with medical needs, insured or not.
Medical bills do not have to be an additional burden for those with medical needs. The following describes two insured individuals, in two different systems.
Two women, two cancers, two health-care systems
By Tom O’Brien
San Francisco Chronicle
December 29, 2005
I moved back to the United States with my Canadian wife and two small boys after living 15 years in Toronto and Ottawa. U.S. health care now looks both expensive and scary, leading me to conclude that we’d do better with an entirely different system.
Nowhere has this been put in sharper relief than in the story of two colleagues. Struck in March with cancer, an American colleague worried about death, insurance loss and bankruptcy. In contrast, a Canadian colleague and cancer victim had only her disease to fight.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/29/EDGG6GDPDA1.DTL
(This short article is well worth downloading.)