THIS WAS ELIZABETH WARREN’S BOGUS RESEARCH: The Myth of the Medical Bankruptcy.

Did medical bills single-handedly account for more bankruptcies than anything else? No. This is an exaggerated half-remembering of a series of studies, authored by (among others) Elizabeth Warren, that were themselves exorbitant exaggerations.

I went into detail on the problems with the work seven years ago, but the highlight reel is that these authors have an aggressive tendency to employ any technique that ratchets the count of “medical bankruptcy” upward, while not using similar techniques that would tend to ratchet up other categories and diminish the number of bankruptcies counted as medical, and to present their results in misleading ways — so as to obscure, for example, the fact that by their own accounting, the number of medical bankruptcies actually fell by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2007. Which is why their study tended to be presented in the media as “growing problem” rather than “shrinking threat.”

To be clear: I don’t believe that medical bankruptcies fell by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2007. I think this conclusion further suggests just how problematic their methodology is. So does the fact that in 2011, two of Warren’s co-authors issued a new study finding that medical bankruptcy hadn’t fallen in Massachusetts after the passage of Romneycare. These two co-authors are the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Care Program, an advocacy group that supports single-payer in America, and they have a noticeable tendency to find that — quelle surprise — America has enormous problems with medical bills that can be solved only by a single-payer health-care system. They have a lot of latitude to get that answer, because it’s surprisingly hard to know exactly which bankruptcies are medical. Someone who bought three new cars, and also had a hernia, is probably going to blame the hernia.

It’s almost like anything that comes from Elizabeth Warren is suspect.