Americans for Stable Quality Care

There's a very compelling commercial from the Americans for Stable Quality Care on our local networks here in Texas. They are a diverse, largely-bipartisan coalition of groups dedicated to the cause of healthcare reform. The ad manages to speak volumes by saying very little. There is no dialogue, only a visual narrative of a man packing his house (but keeping his wife's picture) to move to a small apartment. He then goes to his wife in her hospital bed.

The message is clear without fabricating statistics or appealing to anything more than our humanity. While one's home is a protected asset when filing bankruptcy in most states (with some exceptions), many people lose their most cherished (and valuable) asset long before they are even able to file for bankruptcy. It's a slow and insidious process and people often borrow against their homes or skip mortgage payments to cover medical bills.

Consider this:

In 2001, about 1.5 million Americans families filed for bankruptcy, half of it due to the inability to pay for healthcare. The United States spends 31% of medical expenses on administrative costs, compared to Canada’s 16.7% administrative costs.

Now imagine the numbers for the disabled who are not being allocated the resources they need to be productive (read: working) individuals, with health insurance. And ALL of them have pre-existing conditions. This "data" on this cohort is more difficult to collect but usually even more bleak.