Health Issues and Health Care Expenses in Canadian Bankruptcies and Insolvencies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Illness can contribute to financial problems directly, through high medical bills, and indirectly, through lost income. No previous in-depth studies have documented the role of medical problems among Canadian bankruptcy filers. We obtained the bankruptcy filings from a random sample of 5,000 debtors across Canada and mailed surveys to them seeking information about the medical antecedents of their bankruptcy. A total of 521 debtors responded (response rate of 10.4%), of whom 40.1 percent reported losing at least two weeks of work-related income because of illness or injury in the two years before their filing; 8.3 percent reported a similar income loss because of caregiving responsibilities for someone else who was ill. Although 60.1 percent of respondents reported being responsible for a medical bill within the previous two years, only 6.9 percent had bills over $5,000 (all amounts in Canadian Dollars). Prescription drugs were cited as the costliest medical expense by two-thirds of debtors reporting bills > $5,000, with dental bills cited by 22.2 percent. Universal health insurance affords Canadians protection against ruinous doctor and hospital bills. Inadequate coverage for prescription drugs and dental care, however, leaves some with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. In addition, illness is a frequent indirect cause of bankruptcy through loss of work-related income.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".