7-27-07, 10:07 am

WASHINGTON -- Health care activists, including one woman whose family went broke due to high medical bills, used a congressional hearing on medical bill-caused bankruptcy to push for government-run national health care.

While the activists and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) lobbied for his universal government-run health care bill (HR 676), by saying it would prevent future bankruptcies, Republicans disputed his claim. Their witness--a law professor from the conservative George Mason University in Virginia--denied there was a bankruptcy problem at all.

The July 17 hearing was for a Judiciary subcommittee to gather data about causes of bankruptcy, a subject the committee deals with, and particularly how many bankruptcies are caused by huge medical bills. Conyers chairs the full Judiciary Committee.

More than 1 million people must declare bankruptcy every year. Data at the session said high medical bills account in part--but not wholly--for 46 percent of the cases.

But witnesses made clear that medical bankruptcy was, as one said, “only the tip of the iceberg” of the high medical bills and soaring costs that hurt workers and families, most of whom struggle to pay the bills--while being denied insurance payments even if they’re covered--without declaring bankruptcy.

Many families, witnesses added, are just one bad illness away from going broke.

The results can be catastrophic. “The National Institutes of Medicine tell us that at least 18,000 adults die each year because they cannot access health insurance. And yet we take that statistic as commonplace,” said Harvard Medical School Professor David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

A more common scenario was sketched out by Aurora, Colo., resident Donna Smith, who briefly appeared in Michael Moore’s latest film, Sicko, about the U.S. health care system. Her congressman, Rep. Thomas Tancredo (R), is running for the GOP presidential nomination and gave the family no help, Smith said.

Smith’s husband, who is slim, was nonetheless diagnosed with coronary artery disease and also an hereditary separate arterial ailment. The coronary ailments required multiple surgeries since 1990, including one due to medical error.

Smith worked to support both of them, and the couple struggled to pay medical bills and premiums, until she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She later developed back problems from having to return to work early and undertake heavy lifting, against doctors’ orders, after her cancer treatment ended.

Meanwhile, even though they ran through their savings and sold their house, the bills kept piling up and medical creditors started garnishing her paychecks, Smith testified.

“Bankruptcy was the only way to stop the garnishment,” but it didn’t stop the bills. “We put food and household items on credit, borrowed against older cars, ordered needed goods through high-priced mail order firms…and all those debts had to be included. No one was spared.

“Our problems with extreme medical costs and the resulting bankruptcy hurt a wide variety of businesses and individuals. We’re collateral damage of the national health care crisis, I guess,” Smith told lawmakers.

Conyers said the testimony by Smith and the other witnesses--the Republican excepted--showed even more that the nation needs government-run universal health insurance. That would cut costs, including eliminating insurers’ huge profits and overhead, plus insurers’ denial of care, by eliminating the insurance companies and their role. It would also eliminate the high bills that forced Smith into bankruptcy.

“It’s particularly difficult to separate the health care crisis from medical bankruptcy,” the veteran Democrat from Detroit explained. “They’re tied together.

“You are in a system,” Conyers told witnesses, “of structural violence, where the statistics are so bad that the outcome will be bad, too. You’re trapped in a system of bad statistics on health care, longevity, death rates and birth rates--and all come in on you. Medical bankruptcy is one of the consequences of health care in America.”

Conyers said the medical system “is set up” to “tear up families and create stress and suffering” both for those it forces into bankruptcy and for families who struggle to pay their bills. But he also said the nation is taking a second look at government-run universal health care--which would eliminate medical bankruptcies--as private companies drop or cut health care coverage.

Alluding to the auto industry’s financial troubles, which have endangered workers’ pay and retirees’ health care, Conyers added: “Michigan people used to tell me that ‘Oh, HR 676 is fine, but I’m with the UAW and Ford, so I’m covered.’ They’re not telling me that any more.”

From International Labor Communications and Press Associates Inc.