LOS ANGELES — Ten percent of LA County residents are burdened with medical debt, according to a first-ever report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released Wednesday.
Medical debt affects about 810,000 residents, including 12% who are impacted by diabetes, 8% by asthma and 6% by smoking.
“Medical debt has been the principal source of personal debt and number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and undermines financial security, a key social determinant of health,” LA County Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. “People who are burdened by medical debt tend to be the most vulnerable among us. They are overwhelmingly people who are sick and trying to get well but unable to afford it.”
Even with recent expansions to the Affordable Care Act and insurance coverage increases in response to the COVID-19 emergency, medical debt loads did not improve from 2017 to 2021.
People lacking medical insurance were most impacted, with 26.3% facing medical debt, though 8.3% of individuals with private insurance and 9.4% of people with the state’s Medicaid health care program, Medi-Cal, were also medically debt-burdened.
The report found that insured patients were burdened with high out-of-pocket expenses, such as deductibles and copays. High hospital costs also contributed to debt. Adults who had one or more in-patient stays in the past year were over two and half times as likely to be burdened with medical debt than those who did not stay in a hospital.
People who visited the emergency room at least once were also twice as likely to be burdened with medical debt.
The report found that adults in households with children were more likely to be burdened compared to households without children. Lower-income residents were also almost twice as likely to have medical debt compared with people with higher incomes.
Latinos had the highest incidence of medical debt (12.4%), followed by Blacks (11%) and American Indians/Alaska Natives (12.7%).
The report found medical debt had serious impacts on life and health. Being unable to cover health care costs often leads to high-interest credit card debt. Fifty percent of adults burdened with medical debt said they took on credit card debt to pay their medical bills, and 46% said they could not pay for basic necessities such as food and shelter.
Those who are medically debt-burdened were also almost three times more likely to skip or delay necessary health care and three and a half times as likely to delay picking up prescriptions or forgo them.