A new study from public health scholars at the University of California, Berkeley and Pennsylvania State University has found Black Americans are significantly more likely to carry medical debt than Americans of other racial backgrounds.
For their study, the authors examined credit reports for nearly 24 million adults from 2016 to 2022. Although medical debt declined for all racial groups over these eight years, Black adults consistently had the highest rate of referrals to collection agencies for medical bills and the highest accumulated medical debt in collections compared to Hispanic, White, and Asian and Pacific Islander adults throughout the study period.
In 2016, some 15.6 percent of Black borrowers had new medical debt collections, compared to 8.7 percent of Hispanic borrowers, 8.6 percent of White borrowers, and 1.8 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander borrowers. By 2022, the share of Black borrowers with new medical debt collections dropped to 11.2 percent. Despite experiencing the largest percentage-point drop of all racial groups, Black borrowers’ rate in 2022 remained nearly twice the rate of Hispanic borrowers (6.5 percent) and White borrowers (5.9 percent), and over nine times the rate of Asian and Pacific Islander borrowers (1.2 percent).
“Across all analyses, Black borrowers experienced increased medical debt compared to other racial and ethnic groups. These results represent a somber yet expected result of well-documented differences across health and finances,” the authors conclude. “Importantly, medical debt may also be a part of a cyclical relationship whereby medical debt contributes to both worse health and overall finances. When medical debt is accrued, it may lead to further barriers to health-promoting activities and increase financial instability. In these ways, our results reflect a stark consequence of and contributor to inequities across social domains that Black Americans face.”
