Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, according to a KFF analysis of government survey data, and there is growing support to relieve patients of this financial burden.
About 14 million people, or 6 percent of the adult population of the United States, are facing medical bills of more than $1,000, and three million people (1 percent of adults) owe more than $10,000 in unpaid medical bills, according to KKF.
The Biden administration touts its efforts to reduce medical debt through increased Obamacare enrollment and regulations to eliminate unpaid medical bills as a factor in credit scoring by private bureaus. However, a growing number of local governments, including New York City and Cook County, Illinois, are erasing billions of dollars in medical debts using private donors’ funds, National Public Radio reports.
Two Sides of a Coin
Someone always pays, whether through cost shifting, as in Obamacare, or other government fixes, such as medical debt relief, says Matt Dean, senior fellow for health care policy outreach at The Heartland Institute, which publishes Health Care News.
Congress should consider free-market reforms, says Dean, such as those proposed by Rep. Pete Sessions (TX-R); John C. Goodman, president of the Goodman Institute and co-publisher of Health Care News; and a bipartisan bill to make health care costs more transparent.
“Pete Sessions hits the nail on the head,” said Dean. “Reform that only focuses on the payment side or the delivery side misses the importance of the balance between the two. Congressman Sessions understands that you need services to pay for and a way to pay for them.”
‘Medical Debts Are Phony Numbers’
Hospital prices are not really prices, they are the amounts that hospitals charge patients when they are discharged, says John C. Goodman, president of the Goodman Institute and co-publisher of Health Care News.
These charges are phony for three reasons, says Goodman. First, the charges are not determined by market prices. Second, there is a different charge for different patients, depending on their third-party insurer. Third, patients are never given a specific amount to pay before admission.
“For those same three reasons, medical debts are phony numbers,” said Goodman. “Why then should a patient be obligated to pay a phony number?”
The debt of patients struggling to pay medical bills should be discounted, says Goodman.
“At a minimum, we should let the debt be reduced to the hospital’s cash price (announced in advance to the uninsured) or to a national free market price charged, say, to Canadians and other medical tourists,” said Goodman. “In addition, we should adjust the debt to some reasonable percent of the patient’s income to reflect the fact that hospitals receive an enormous amount of federal money to provide charity care for low-income patients.”
Push for Single Payer
Medical debt is used as an argument for a single-payer health care system, says Roger Stark, M.D., a health care policy analyst at the Washington Policy Center and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, which publishes Health Care News.
“Financial debt and bankruptcy are real problems for a small percent of Americans,” said Stark. “Yet, if we look at a fixed point in time, a much larger percent of Americans has debt they are paying down. The KFF article even admits that some people are essentially financially irresponsible.”
Medical debt forgiveness would further involve the government in paying for health care while ignoring other solutions, says Stark. “Unfortunately, many people, including the mainstream media, believe that bureaucrats have all the answers to our health care delivery system problems,” said Stark.
There are free market solutions to high medical costs, says Stark, including health savings accounts, price transparency, changes to the federal tax code, insurance regulatory reform, elimination of costly mandates, and greater use of telemedicine and association health plans.
Welfare State Rights
Socialists promote the acquisition of government power as a good thing that will provide for citizens, says John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., a physician and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
“It is a government program to address a need,” said Dunn. “Medical care is the place where socialists can promote their welfare programs, followed in order by other areas of need outlined by FDR in his 1944 State of the Union address.”
“FDR declared the government must provide for a second bill of rights—the right to a totalitarian and autocratic welfare state,” said Dunn. “Imagine that.”
Kenneth Artz (KApublishing@gmx.com) writes from Tyler, Texas.
