Healthcare experts like to say that men don’t die of prostate cancer, they die with prostate cancer.
Megan McArdle links to a bankruptcy specialist who says the same thing about whether medical bills cause bankruptcy:
People going bankrupt don't pay their medical bills because it's for services already provided. That ranks right below everything else on the priority list. Now, income lost due to illness is a common cause of bankruptcy, but health insurance or not doesn't really change that.
So, it’s kind of like firms going bankrupt with a lot of accounts payable.
Except that we don’t have the chutzpah to say that firms need to have payment on their accounts payable made by a third party at the time of delivery.
