Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., made a startling claim in his opening statement as the Senate Health Committee held a hearing on “the medical debt crisis in America.”
Sanders said that “over 66% of all personal bankruptcies in this country, some 530,000 per year, are connected to unpaid medical bills.”
That certainly sounds like a crisis, but is his statement accurate? Well, not quite.
Medical debt is indeed a problem for some. However, politicians hyping medical debt into a “crisis” aren’t only being misleading, they’re pushing unnecessarily radical changes when reasonable reforms would do the job.
To start with, Sanders’ statistics were derived using a flawed methodology that was shown to be inaccurate 20 years ago. Other scholars, using the same data, found that “medical bills are a contributing factor in just 17% of personal…
