A reason not to marry: Medical bankruptcy

Source: Canadian Family Physician

If you’re a middle-class family and you learn that your beloved spouse is going to require long-term care, do you know what hospital social workers recommend? Get divorced. Otherwise you’ll go bankrupt.
And do it as soon as you can. It takes five years after a divorce before your assets are no longer subject to seizure. That’s because the government knows couples get divorced in order to escape medical bills.
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent op-ed piece on this problem in today’s New York Times. He describes the case of a woman whose husband had dementia. She knew he would eventually need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”
“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.
Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.
“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

Medical bankruptcy for the insured and death for the uninsured

Medical bankruptcies have increased almost 50 percent in just the last six years. As recently as 1981, bankruptcies due to medical expenses were 8 percent. The conservative estimate is now 62 percent. More than three quarters of medical bankruptcies happen to people with health insurance, and most of these families are well educated, own homes, and have middle-class occupations. It’s the gaps in insurance policies and the unexpected inadequacy of insurance coverage that leaves people unprotected from devastating costs.
Critics claim health care reform will undermine the values of the American family, but in fact the system we have breaks families apart. It also costs lives. There are 18,000 unnecessary deaths each year due to a lack of health insurance. That’s one person dying every half hour.

It’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.
So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.
If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Related posts:
Why are US health care costs so high?
Will health care reform stop the rising cost of health care?
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