Megan McArdle got all riled up after the HC vote sounding almost conservative when she wrote:
Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don’t find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, social security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn’t–if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission–then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.
Oh, wait–suddenly it doesn’t seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it? Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free “Screw You” vote to balance out what the Democrats just did.
If the GOP takes the legislative innovations of the Democrats and decides to use them, please don’t complain that it’s not fair. Someone could get seriously hurt, laughing that hard.
But now she backtracks to her more liberal leanings looking for gold where there is none. In her HC predictions, she swallows whole the liberal meme that lack of healthcare is a major cause of bankruptcy. Her impeccable authority is none other than Dr. David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, who conducted an “unbiased” study which found that 2/3 of all bankruptcies in 2007 involved unpaid medical bills.
David Himmelstein claims to believe that the majority of all bankruptcies are related to medical issues, and that this is a strong argument for national health care . . . i.e., he claims to believe that medical bills rather than income loss are the main causal driver here. . . . I will make a bold counterclaim: the bankruptcy rate after 2014 will not fall by half. It won’t even fall by a quarter. This is among the easiest effects to measure, as if the people citing these statistics are right, we should see a sharp and immediate reduction in bankruptcy rates in the first year, with the full effects evident by 2018.
Well, Megan, not to worry, because according to the Manhattan Institute:
. . . fewer than one percent of Americans enter bankruptcy each year. Of those, only three to five percent are plausibly bankrupt due to medical debt. These numbers present the inconvenient truth that our health system is not leading to bankruptcy in America.
The Himmelstein study paints a picture of an American middle class that even with health insurance coverage is being bankrupted by health care costs. The share of bankruptcies attributable to health care costs rose by 50% between 2001 and 2007, according to the study. The message is that rising health care costs bankrupt the insured middle class as well as the uninsured lower class.
Dr. Himmelstein’s study contradicts the economics literature on personal bankruptcies. Most reputable studies are based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, published by the Federal Reserve, which lists different types of consumer debt. Medical debt rose slightly from 5.5% of all debt in 2001 to 5.8% of all debt in 2007, according to the Fed.
A study by the Department of Justice examined more than 5,000 bankruptcy cases between 2000 and 2002. It found that 54% of bankruptcies involve no medical debt, and more than 90% have medical debt of less than $5,000. Even among the minority of bankruptcies that report medical debt, only a few have enough to cause personal bankruptcy.
