This commentary reports on findings on the relationship between medical debt, premature death, and overall mortality at the county level. This is the first study on the iatrogenic harms of medical debt to include patient-reported outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, the authors demonstrated a link between medical debt and outcomes like self-reported physical and mental unhealthy days, disease-specific mortality rates, and overall mortality, going as far as to argue medical debt is a public health crisis.
Commentators pointed out that this crisis is “in large part one of our health care sytem’s own making” and going on to note that as much as one-third of expenditures are wasted due to inefficiencies. They recommend institutions stopping especially-harmful practices like aggressive debt collection, and ensuring non-profit hospitals fully reinvest their tax breaks into things that benefit the community. Furthermore, they recommend tying Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to institutions’ adherence to these quality metrics.
Commentators hope we can make people healthier and reduce downstream expenses by focusing on debt prevention and mitigation, thus improving population-level health.
“Our collective action today to address unsustainable debt may pay off substantial dividends in the future with dollars and lives saved”
“Surely”, the commentators conclude, “everyone can agree that a consequence of accessing health care should not be worse health”.