62.1 percent of 2007 bankruptcies were provoked by healthcare costs, researchers say.

If it was bad eight years ago, it’s even worse now: Illness and medical bills contribute to a growing share of U.S. bankruptcies, a study says.

Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released by the American Journal of Medicine. That’s nearly 20 percentage points higher than that pool of respondents reported were connected to medical costs in 2001.

Insurance Not Enough to Prevent Default

Health insurance is no guarantee that medical expenses won’t bankrupts a patient. Of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, nearly 80 percent had health insurance, the Washington Post reported.

Respondents who reported having insurance indicated average expenses of just under $18,000. Respondents who filed and lacked insurance had average medical bills of nearly $27,000.

A similar 2001 study in five states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2 percent of all bankruptcies. Since then, health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened, the authors said.

The researchers surveyed 2,314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court records, and interviewed 1,032 of them. The authors designated bankruptcies as “medical” based on debtors’ stated reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the size of medical debts.

The researchers said they used a conservative definition and still found that 62.1 percent of 2007 bankruptcies were medical.

Middle Class Under Siege

Here’s a breakdown of what the researchers found:

            • Big bills: 92 percent of medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000 or 10 percent of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills.

            • Steep climb: Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6 percent.

            • Double down: The odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38 times higher in 2007 than in 2001.

            • American Dream: Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance.

Though the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 makes it more difficult to file for bankruptcy, it doesn’t appear to be the root of the predominance of medical-cost induced bankruptcy. “New restrictions fall equally on medical and nonmedical bankruptcies, with no preferences for medical debts or sick debtors,” the authors said.

Many patients put medical expenses on their credit cards, the study said.

One critic of the report noted that one of the authors, David Himmelstein MD, is a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for single-payer national health insurance.