30 Sickening stats about healthcare and medical debt.

1.  Medical bills are the number one reason for bankruptcy in the United States, causing more than 60% of all BK’s.  Approximately three-fourths of those who go BK because of medical bills have health insurance.

2.  An illness or hospital stay that requires intensive care can easily rack up medical bills over one million dollars.

3.  Every year, it’s estimated that hospitals overcharge Americans by about 10 billion dollars.

4.  Medical billing advocates estimate that over 90% of the medical bills thy audit have “gross overcharges.”

5.  41% of working age Americans are currently paying off medical debt or have some sort of medical bill problems.

  

6.  Hospitals often knock their bills down by 95% for those who know their system and how it works, but the uninsured, uneducated, and secondary language speakers often have no access to these discounts.

7.  The average recovery on hospital medical bills is 15.3%.  Non-hospital medical facilities recover an average of 21.8% of each bill.

8.  U.S. hospitals write off about 5.4% of their gross revenue as bad or unrecoverable patient debt every quarter.

9.  In 2012, 75 million people reported having problems paying off their medical debt, up from only 58 million in 2005.

10.  The average uninsured household has zero assets.

11.  At least 24 pharmaceutical companies made over a billion dollars profit in 2008, alone.

12.  Litigation and liability in the medical system added an estimated $55.6 billion to healthcare costs in 2008 alone.

13.  Americans spend about 200% for healthcare compared to people in other developed nations, but receive much lower quality and efficiency.

14.  The foreign-born population was about two-and-a-half times more likely to be without health insurance than those born in the U.S.

15.  The uninsured end up paying for 35% of their care out-of-pocket.  They are typically billed more and pay more than insured patients.

16.  More than 80% of uninsured are U.S. citizens and 19.7% are non-citizens.

17.  More than 60% of the uninsured have at least one full-time worker in their family, and 16% have at least one part-time worker.

18.  28% of adults with a chronic health condition say they’ve skipped doses or didn’t fill a prescription because of the cost.

19.  In 2012, 43% of adults, or 80 million people, skilled or delayed needed medical care because of the cost. 

20.  That includes 26.8% of families that have experienced the financial burden of trying to pay medical bills.

21.  Almost 1 in 6, or 16.5%, of U.S. families had trouble paying medical bills within the last 12 months.

22.  More than one in three, or 36% of families with children experience financial burdens due to medical care.

23.  More than 1 in 5 families, or 21.4%, were trying to pay their medical bills over time.

24.  Approximately 15.4% of the U.S. population was without health insurance in 2012, or 48.6 million people.

25.  In 2012, Health care spending in the United States grew 3.7% to $2.8 trillion, or $8,915 per person.

26.  Between 1999 and 2009, health insurance premiums for small employers increased by 180%.

27.  U.S. wages increased by 3.8% between 2000 and 2006, but health care cost premiums increased by 87%.

28.  Even during the Great Recession, U.S. healthcare companies cashed in, increasing their profits by 56% just in 2009.

29.  The five biggest for-profit health insurance companies in the U.S. made a combined profit of $12.2 billion just in 2009.

30.  The top executives at those five companies made $200 million in compensation that year.