Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of the first nationwide study on medical causes of bankruptcy, will testify next week before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, convened by Rep. John Conyers, on the alarming rise in medically related bankruptcies.

Woolhandler and her co-authors at the Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School and Ohio University recently published a study in the American Journal of Medicine that shows nearly two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 were linked to medical bills or illness, and that most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class and had health insurance when they became sick. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 50 percent. Dr. Woolhandler will present the findings as part of a call for a single-payer national health insurance program, a publicly funded and privately administered national health care program similar to Medicare.

According to study co-author Dr. Woolhandler, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and primary care physician in Cambridge, Mass.:

"Only single-payer national health insurance can make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by saving the hundreds of billions we now waste on insurance overhead and bureaucracy. Reforms that expand phony insurance - stripped-down plans riddled with co-payments, deductibles and exclusions - won’t stem the rising tide of medical bankruptcy."