A Healthcare Divorce

Another great column from Nicholas Kristof. This one is about the unnecessary suffering due to our current health care system.

A few excerpts...

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

“I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. “The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”

So M. divorced the man she loves.

and

A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills.

and

A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

So exactly how is it that people can rationally oppose health care reform. I guess the operative word in that sentence is rational.