Julia Baird has an article in Newsweek dated March 11th called “Voice of the Middle Class: Why Wall Street Hates Elizabeth Warren.” It is the puffiest of puff pieces. If you took out the friendly adjectives– “Warren has been transformed from mild-mannered Harvard professor to the sharp-shooting, feisty head of the Congressional Oversight Committee”; “Warren is concise, logical, and angry”—there would be nothing left.

Baird reports that Warren, “in a landmark study, found that more than half of all people who declare bankruptcy cite medical reasons.” That this finding has been fiercely contested—that the balance of evidence suggests that her … Continue Reading

The American Journal of Medicine released a study yesterday purporting to show that “62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical.” This claim was then picked up by multiple reporters including the Los Angeles Times‘ Lisa Girion (”medical bills contributed to 62% of all bankruptcies”), Reuters‘ Maggie Fox (”medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies”) and the Sacramento Bee’s Bobby Caina Calvan (”the cost of health care continues to burden Americans in alarming numbers, with 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 blamed on unaffordable medical bills”).

All of these stories … Continue Reading