Code Red

Professor David Dranove

For the past few months, I keep reading and hearing about medical bankruptcies. Newspapers, NPR, politicians, even President Obama.  First it was “half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical spending.”  Then it was seventy percent.  And it didn’t matter if you had health insurance – medical bankruptcy was always just around the corner.  The Democrats even want to cap out of pocket payments in private health insurance so that Americans don’t go bankrupt. Some think we need a single payer system to eliminate the threat of medical bankruptcy.