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Managing Medical Bills On The Brink Of Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby, Mirya Holman Dec 2009

Managing Medical Bills On The Brink Of Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby, Mirya Holman

Melissa B. Jacoby

This paper presents original empirical evidence on financial interactions between medical providers and their patients who go bankrupt. We use a nationally representative sample of people who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 to compare two popular but hotly contested methods of measuring medical burden. By applying both methods to the same filers, we find that nearly four out of five respondents had some financial obligation for medical care not covered by insurance in the two years prior to filing as measured by the survey method. The court record method paints a different picture, with only half of the cases containing …


The Debt Financing Of Parenthood, Melissa B. Jacoby Dec 2008

The Debt Financing Of Parenthood, Melissa B. Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby

In this contribution to the symposium Show Me the Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, I explore an under-appreciated participant in the assisted reproduction and adoption industries: consumer lenders. Through fertility clinics and other service providers, financial institutions market and distribute loans specifically to finance acquisition of treatments, drugs, and human eggs. Adoption foundations and agencies advertise for-profit loans to intended parents, while small foundations offer adoption loans that appear to be low-cost financially but may condition loan approval on intended parent characteristics such as religious observance, marital status, sexual orientation, and adherence to traditional gender roles. After discussing how …