Later On

The Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, Elizabeth Edwards, a former bankruptcy attorney and now Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, testified before the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the rise in bankruptcies in America and its relation to increasing health care costs. "Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable," said Edwards. Calling for affordable health care, Edwards referenced a recent Harvard study finding that "at least 62 percent of bankruptcy debtors can trace at least part of their financial hardship to medical debt." Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of the Harvard study, testified with Edwards and said "private insurance is a defective product that leaves millions of middle-class families vulnerable to financial ruin." In response to these failures, President Obama has argued for a public option as an important part of providing affordable health care to every American. But some Democrats in both the House and Senate are advocating dropping the public option from their respective health reform bills. Edwards’ testimony, though, highlights the need to get health reform right. "To ignore the fact that medical costs are an underlying problem of the economic meltdown we’ve experienced would be to turn a blind eye to a significant problem that we can solve," Edwards told the committee.