Has universal health coverage in Massachusetts led to a marked decrease in the number of medical bankruptcies? Apparently not, and a big part of the reason is that medical bankruptcies often have very little to do with medical expenditures. Megan McArdle dives into this subject at The Atlantic.

I find the issue of medical bankruptcies conceptually interesting because I think the appropriate public policy goal with regard to medical care is to protect households against catastrophic medical expenditures and the costs associated with managing chronic illnesses, subject to prudential limits. That is, the goal is to protect households against something like medical bankruptcies — not contributory or incidental medical bankruptcies, but the nightmare scenarios when a family is forced to endanger its day-to-day well-being because a child has leukemia. And I think that’s why a somewhat misleading gloss on the actual number of medical bankruptcies proved so influential.