The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [117]
39 Among all respondents, 68.0 percent identify a job problem in the two-year period before they filed for bankruptcy. In 2001, this amounted to an estimated 1,047,000 households in bankruptcy in the aftermath of a job problem.
40 Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works/He Works: How Two-Income Families Are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 2, 5. See discussion in chapter 3.
41 John M. Broder, “Problem of Lost Health Benefits Is Reaching into the Middle Class,” New York Times, November 25, 2002.
42 D. U. Himmelstein, S. Woolhandler, and O. Carrasquillo, unpublished analysis of data from the Current Population Survey and the National Health Interview Survey.
43 Comparisons between bankruptcy filers in the early 1980s and today are difficult, because no one collected precisely the same data then as now. The best comparative estimate can be made from a 1981 survey that the San Antonio courts required of all families who filed for bankruptcy, which shows that about 8 percent of the filers cited a medical reason for filing. Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors, p. 175, n. 1. Extrapolating that sample to all filers in 1980 would suggest that about 23,000 families filed for bankruptcy in the wake of a medical problem. Other reports from about the same time estimate a lower number of medical-related bankruptcies, but they rely exclusively on court records to identify medical debt still outstanding at the time of filing and do not ask the debtors directly what happened. For example, a 1978 study in Albany, New York, found that medical bills constituted less than 2 percent of scheduled debts, but the study was based entirely on identifying medical bills in court records. B. A. Gold and E. A. Donahue, “Health Care and Personal Bankruptcy,” Journal of Health Politics and Law 7 (1982): 734-739. For comparability to the 1981 data, the 2001 calculation includes only families who specifically identified a medical reason, thus excluding those who identified lost time at work because of medical problems. That subset would suggest that about 424,500 families in 2002 filed because of an identified medical reason—more than a twentyfold increase. For more information on current filings for medical reasons, see David Himmelstein, Deborah Thorne, Elizabeth Warren, and Steffie Woolhandler, “Illness and Injury as a Cause of Bankruptcy in the United States” (forthcoming, 2003).
44 Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Special Studies, P23-190, 65+ in the United States, 1996, Table 2-1, Elderly Population by Age: 1900-2050.
45 Twenty-two percent of working parents report receiving at least one hour of unpaid assistance from their own parents each month, compared with 38 percent of working parents who report providing at least one hour of unpaid assistance to their own parents each month. Jody Heymann, The Widening Gap: Why America’s Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 103-104.
46 In 2000, there were 36 million hospital discharges in the United States. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Health Care Indicators, Table 1, Selected Community Hospital Statistics, 1998-2002.
47 In 2001, approximately 27,500 single-income couples, or 0.13 percent of all single-income couples in the United States, filed for bankruptcy after missing two or more weeks of work without pay because of the illness of the worker or of another family member. By comparison, 82,800 two-income couples, or 0.25 percent of the total, filed for bankruptcy after missing work because of illness.
48 Approximately 43 percent of marriages end in divorce.