Healthcare and Bankruptcy

Medical expense leads to insolvency

When Congress passed so-called bankruptcy reform legislation in 2005, its supporters cited the need to combat bankruptcy fraud. But many experts felt that the majority of bankruptcies were filed legitimately, did not involve fraud, and resulted from job loss or catastrophic illness. Now, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee is investigating the role that medical debts play in forcing consumers to file for bankruptcy.

The subcommittee held a hearing last week at which a panel of scholars and experts testified concerning the role of medical debts in bankruptcy cases. Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School and Dr. David Himmelstein of Harvard Medical School reported on the results of their joint research, which shows that medical debts appear to be the cause of one-half of all consumer bankruptcy filings. Professor Warren and Dr. Himmelstein also told the subcommittee that bankruptcy filings due to medical debts are a troubling trend among middle class Americans, not just lower-income families.

Elizabeth Warren a professor of Law at Harvard Law School, recently testifed before the House Judiciary Committee about bankruptcy among the middle class. You might be interested to know that Professor Warren is also an advisor to John Edwards.

I think this is the sort of thing that matters in regard to the Edwards campaign. The article mentions that roughly five million families have been forced into bankruptcy by medical expenses. Five million families. Who is to blame for allowing that to happen? Who is working to call attention to that problem, while others are mouthing bland platitudes?

Meanwhile a writer for a paper in South Carolina wrote a piece on Edwards saying he is a poo-poo head. He is inauthentic and not nice to office staff, as contrasted with Howard Dean who is nice to everyone, every day, all the time. Now that he is no longer running for elective office and has stopped screaming. Okaaay, but who exactly is this writer? Does he tend to lean Democratic or is he generally pro-GOP? or sort of something that cannot be so easily quantified?

He commented on his own story as follows. Note that he cites someone he knows who has been working with Edwards as saying "that's simply not so", which presumably comes from someone who has had a good deal more time than Warthen to be around Edwards, both on and off stage.

And interestingly, in this earlier editorial Warthen recounts an Editorial Board meeting at his paper, where they met to decide who to endorse in the 2004 election. The choices included Edwards, but although Warthen references annecdotes from that campaign to explain why Edwards is a complete douche, in that earlier article he does not mention that as influencing his thinking. What happened since 2004 to turn Warthen so strongly against Edwards, in a way that he does not share with his readers in his earlier column, which was written closer to the events that he writes about in his recent column.

So what can one make of that? I can understand someone just deciding that they don't like someone, for whatever reason, and stringing together a snippet here a snippet there until it forms a picture that appears to buttress their gut reaction. I could do the same thing to Warthen, without breaking a sweat, and paint a picture of him as a nutbag. I think he is not that, but I suspect he is backing another candidate and that something about that smartaleckey John Edwards just sticks in his craw. For someone who likes Joe Lieberman and thinks the bad Democrats (myself included) who beat his sorry ass in the Connecticut primary are bad bad ideologues, and in another column speaks of how much he likes Obama... well, it is hard to figure out what Warthen is up to. It may be that he likes Obama. It may be that he likes the Democrats nominating Obama because he thinks he will never win. It may be that he fears Edwards and wants to make sure people don't vote for him in the early South Carolina primary. It could be one of a gazillion things.

It is no fun for the Edwards campaign to have this happen, but it comes with the territory. If one is a viable candidate, even lagging far behind the two front-runners, things like this, and worse, are going to be written over and over again before the campaign is over. In regard to personal reactions to politicians I have a lot of my own reactions, but I don't have a column to put them into. And I think in the end it is not going to come down to what one individual thinks, it is going to come down to the public's reactions to a narrowed group of candidates, as the deadwood gets winnowed out along the campaign trail. When there are three or four GOP candidates and three or four Democratic candidates, then I think we'll really start to see what we are dealing with. I don't have any clear sense about Obama yet. Will I like him better when I hear more from him? Maybe. Will Hillary grow on me? Whew, hard to imagine, but anything is possible.

Arthur