Disability Issues

Alliance for Retired Americans member Dolores talks about her paying for prescription drugs as a cancer survicor and the payments she has to make while in the Medicare Part D doughnut hole.

A video by FamiliesUSA about the Doughnut Hole in Medicare.

On Friday, September 22nd 2006, President Bush’s Part D prescription drug disaster will surprise tens of thousands of seniors when it stops paying for their medications. That’s the day when the average Medicare enrollee falls into Part D’s dangerous “donut hole”. The donut hole exists because conservatives designed Part D more for insurance and pharmaceutical companies than for enrollees.

Tom Scully seems to think that Medicare Part D-Presciption Coverage is competitively priced. In 2010 the monthly premiums and annual deductibles are set to increase substantially from 2009. In 2010, the doughnut hole is only increasing by $130 which isn’t signiificant. Mr. Scully repeatedly states that Medicare Part D-Presciption Coverage is confusing but he pats himself on the back for having designed and implemented the program. A number of viewers who call in tend to differ with his point of view. He doesn’t appropriately answer a number of callers questions and dismisses callers who don’t share his political points of view.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

“Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income,” the researchers wrote.

“Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations.”
The researchers surveyed 2,134 random families who filed for bankruptcy between January and April in 2007, before the current recession began.

They used public bankruptcy court records and survey 1,032 respondents by telephone.

While only 29 percent directly blamed medical bills for their bankruptcy, 62 percent had medical bills that totaled more than 10 percent of family income, said an illness was responsible, had lost income due to illness or some other medical factor.

“Among common diagnoses, nonstroke neurologic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis were associated with the highest out-of-pocket expenditures (mean $34,167), followed by diabetes ($26,971), injuries ($25,096), stroke ($23,380), mental illnesses ($23,178), and heart disease ($21,955),” the researchers wrote.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090604/us_nm/us_healthcare_bankruptcy