By Mike Sweet
Ask anyone to describe someone who files for personal bankruptcy and the description most likely fits an uncomplimentary stereotype.
It’s someone who’s maxed out their credit cards buying things they didn’t need (even though their president said it was patriotic and would rescue the economy).
It would include those who took out a second mortgage on their house to consolidate bills or redecorate, or even a third mortgage to buy a summer home that they couldn’t live without because no one can own too much stuff in an ownership society.
It also can include people with all the above over-commitments, who in addition face those numbing SUV and gasoline payments and paying heating bills that literally go up in smoke, thanks to the Enrons of this world.
Generally, the bankruptcy filer is defined and denigrated as a lowlife who knowingly lived beyond their means and then tries to get out of paying their creditors, who bear neither burden nor guilt for encouraging them to overextend. The only pity permitted is for those unfortunates whose financial crisis is due to losing their job. And then it’s slim pity.
A new Harvard University study done by its law and medical schools has identified a major cause of bankruptcy -that has not been considered previously – medical costs.
Using 2001 data involving 1,771 bankruptcy cases, researchers found that illness and medical bills were the key factor in 54 percent of those bankruptcies.
Further eviscerating the everyone’s-a-deadbeat theory, the study found that most filers were middle class. They were buying homes and had college degrees and good jobs. Three of four had health insurance when they or their family member first got sick.
But as the coverage maxed out, or the insurers dropped them, or they lost their insurance along with their jobs and the ability to pay the premiums, the medical bills piled up beyond their ability to pay.
Steffie Woolhandler, the report’s co-author, concluded “Unless you’re rich, we found you’re one serious illness away from financial ruin.”
Many millions of Americans already knew that. They can do the math for income versus outgo. But they soldier on, making their daily commutes and praying that they don’t get sick or get their job cut in one of those mergers that delight Wall Street.
After a century of progress in which government and law made life better for people, we are headed back into that pre-20th century Darwinian netherworld of dog-eat-dog where we must all walk alone and die in silence, without protestation.
Big business rules. People are just worker bees to be used up. Government is there only to help the rich.
There are skeptics who reject the Harvard conclusion as political. Woolhandler and others invite flak because they belong to the National Health Program, whose members believe that “the only solution to solving the United States’ many health care problems is a single-payer system,” an idea many doctors agree with.
Woolhandler: “Every other developed nation in the world has a single-payer health-care system. There is no reason we can’t make it work in this country.”
Actually there is. It is the view of powerful conservatives like George W.Bush that such a system is socialism, which it would not have to be to work.
The only welfare conservatives countenance is for defense contractors, and for politicians, of course. After all, those taxpayer-paid salaries, generous pensions and health care are not earned in the Darwinian corporate world they insist everyone else must compete in.
Their benefits are provided by the painful contributions of a society that not only does not get equal benefits, but also endures hypocritical lectures about how they must fend for themselves.
And who are told if they go bankrupt or die for lack of health insurance, then so be it.
