Health care costs in the U.S. continue to grow year after year, leaving Americans with more and more debt.
According to Credit Karma data provided to Yahoo Finance, roughly 21 million Americans holding $46 billion of medical debt as of April 2021 face collections — meaning that a third-party debt collector is trying to obtain the money owed.
“Our system is completely out of whack,” Frederick Isasi, executive director at Families USA, a nonprofit and nonpartisan consumer health advocacy organization, told Yahoo Finance. “We’re spending too much money, and yet people could still lose their savings and their financial security. So there’s a lot of frustration about this.”
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A survey of 3,753 adults living in all 50 U.S. states conducted from Feb. 15-21 via the Gallup Panel, indicated that an estimated 46 million people (or 18% of the U.S. population) would be unable to pay for health care if they needed to. (Medical debt often arises from unexpected medical expenses.)