3 ms·
Did you read it? It does quite successfully make the case that Massachusetts' healthcare system has probably improved medical bankruptcy rates. It doesn't make
by cheald 9y ago
Did you read it? It does quite successfully make the case that Massachusetts' healthcare system has probably improved medical bankruptcy rates. It doesn't make any such claim for the ACA at large. In fact, it possibly suggests the contrary - look at Tables 3 and 4 - their estimation is that overall, the percentage of bankruptcies that are medical in nature has risen, and the distribution of medical bankruptcies in the "basket" jurisdictions - the percentage of bankruptcies reporting medical debt increased sharply post-2010! This paper even specifically calls out the Himmelstein paper (which was broadly used as a justification for the ACA) as having far to broad a definition of medical bankruptcy.
I am very willing to accept that the ACA reduced medical bankruptcy rates (it makes intuitive sense!), but I maintain that there's practically no data that validates the claim, and the way that the statistics are manipulated to support that point via correlative inference makes me especially suspicious that it's not actually happening.