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  • Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check - The Numbers

    Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check From the page: President Obama's kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data. The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds, Obama said at the opening of his... more

    Reviewed by aliasinkhorn Mar 05 2009, 09:28pm ( 6 reviews ) • abcnews.com

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  • Reviewed by CptCircumspect on Mar 05 2009, 10:17pm

    Everything is a tragedy with Obama administration. The worse it is the more 'change' he can enact.

  • Rated by aliasinkhorn on Mar 05 2009, 9:28pm

    Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check From the page: President Obama's kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data. The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds, Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable. The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard's own data, he came up with a far lower figure - 17 percent. A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than one every 30 seconds. The extrapolation of Harvard's data to a bankruptcy every 30 seconds, which Obama also mentioned in his address to a joint session of Congress last month, comes, per the White House, from a 2005 Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a co-author of the Harvard paper. Fact-check.org has noted that even using Harvard's numbers, it's more like a bankruptcy every minute; indeed if you add up all bankrputcies in a year you barely get one every 30 seconds. (I've e-mailed Warren for comment.) But more to the point is that the Harvard data are clearly inflated, or at best, mischaracterized ... Obama is very selective about his virtues and mendacity appears to be the chief among his favorites. .

  • Reviewed by malfist on Mar 05 2009, 10:42am

    "an academic reviewer"? Can you tell us who?

  • Rated by Aaronontheweb on Mar 05 2009, 10:25am

    President Obama's kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data. "The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds," according to remarks prepared for the president to open his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable. The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard's own data, he came up with a far lower figure - 17 percent.