"One in Five American Families Have Medical Bill Problems"

Melissa Jacoby at Credit Slips notes some bad news on medical bills:

One in Five American Families Have Medical Bill Problems ... according to this new report.

The error bands are relatively large:

As Mirya Holman and I have explained in the bankruptcy context, measuring medical bill problems and debt is notoriously contested, but the Center for Studying Health System Change does try to make clear its methods and also uses similar metrics over time. The report also contains statistics on the proportion of their sample that considered filing for bankruptcy and actually did file. Definitely worth reading.  

Even allowing for the uncertainty, the numbers are much larger than I find tolerable.