Nearly 1 in 10 Americans carry medical debt
Black adults and people between the ages of 35 and 64 are more likely to owe.
A new analysis of government data estimates that nearly 1 in 10 American adults — or approximately 23 million people — owe medical debt. What’s more, nearly half of those people (11 million) owe more than $2,000, and three million people owe more than $10,000.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) performed the analysis, which was based on data from the 2020 Survey of Income and Program Participation, a nationally representative survey that asks every adult in a household whether they owed money for medical bills in 2019 and how much they owe. It looked at people with medical debt of more than $250.
Related: Medical debt: The latest post-pandemic crisis?
KFF’s analysis suggests that Americans’ collective medical debt totaled more than $195 billion in 2019, with a small share of adults accounting for a huge share of the total.
Researchers noted that estimate is significantly higher than other commonly cited estimates, which generally rely on data from credit reports that may not capture medical debts charged to credit cards or is included in other debts rather than being directly owed to a provider.
“Despite over 90% of the United States population having some form of health insurance, medical debt remains a persistent problem. For people and families with limited assets, even a relatively small unexpected medical expense can be unaffordable,” researchers wrote in their analysis. “For people with significant medical needs, medical debt may build up over time. People living with cancer, for example, have higher levels of debt than individuals who have never had cancer.”
While it’s not clear how the pandemic and resulting recession has affected medical debt, the fact that many people lost jobs and income early on could have resulted in more difficulty affording medical care, according to KFF. On the other hand, it’s been well documented that many people delayed or went without care during the pandemic, thereby not taking on any new medical debt. Shifts in insurance coverage and COVID-related cost-sharing waivers could also affect what people had to pay out-of-pocket.
That said, here are four other findings of the analysis:
- People ages 35-49 and 50-64 are more likely than other adults to have medical debt. They have greater health needs than younger people on average and aren’t yet old enough to qualify for Medicare coverage, which may protect them from high costs.
- Larger shares of people in poor health and those living with a disability report medical debt. People in those groups are more likely to need and receive care than people in better health and without disabilities.
- Among racial and ethnic groups, a larger share of Black adults report having medical debt compared to White, Hispanic, and Asian American adults.
- Adults who were uninsured for more than half of the year are more likely to report medical debt than those who were insured for all or most of the year.
“The fact that medical debt is a struggle even among households with health insurance and middle incomes indicates that simply expanding coverage will not erase the financial burden caused by high cost-sharing amounts and high prices for medical services and prescription drugs,” researchers concluded.
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