500,000 Americans Will Go Bankrupt This Year from Medical Bills?

On January 12 2020, the Facebook page “Lower Drug Prices Now” shared what appeared to be a screenshot of a tweet, which claimed that “500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year” due to medical bills:

Claims referencing “this year” can be difficult to fact-check, as images like the one above could circulate for several years in perpetuity, muddying the timeframe of “this year” (or “this week,” or most commonly, “yesterday.”)

A search for the phrasing used in the screenshot led back to its ostensible source, an August 20 2019 tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Twitter. The tweet’s origin was unsurprising, as Medicare for All was a major plank of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign platform:

Both the tweet and the screenshot contained four lines, and read:

500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills.

They didn’t go to Las Vegas and blow their money at a casino.

Their crime was that they got sick.

How barbaric is a system that says, “I’m going to destroy your family’s finances because you had cancer”?

Although the Facebook post was shared in January 2020, the “this year” clearly referenced 2019 — the year in which Sanders published the tweet. No source was shared alongside the claim, but a fairly specific figure of 500,000 medical bankruptcies was mentioned.

A cursory search revealed both a possible underlying source for the figure, as well as what appeared to be a controversial fact-check. On August 28 2019, a Los Angeles Times op-ed asserted that Sanders had reiterated the “500,000 medical bankruptcies” claim in a debate — and that the Washington Post fact-checked the claim and scored it as “mostly false” or “three Pinocchios.” (The article displays a date of September 4 2019, indicating that it was updated; additional commentary is marked, but changes to the article remained unmarked and impossible to identify via the article itself.)

Diving in, the article explained:

You’ve got to hand it to Sen. Bernie Sanders for his ability to keep hot-button issues in the forefront of the presidential race.

The latest example is his assertion, made at least twice in the last month, that medical bills drive 500,000 Americans into bankruptcy every year. The Washington Post’s fact-checker column examined the numbers and concluded that Sanders deserved “three Pinocchios” for the statement, which means the Post found it “mostly false” and that Sanders was, basically, lying.

The Post blundered, as the authors of the study on which Sanders based his claim point out. In the real world, Sanders’ assertion that “500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills” is “mostly true.” Medical bankruptcy is an American scandal, and possibly even more common than he or the study’s authors calculate.

On the same date as the Los Angeles Times editorial, the Washington Post published a fact-check of Sanders’ assertion. It was indeed rated “mostly false” or “three Pinocchios” as the op-ed said.

We noticed two familiar names in the paper’s examination of the claim — David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler. Himmelstein and Woolhandler were researchers credited with a study referenced by our January 13 2020 fact-check about the cost of Canadian healthcare versus that of the United States.

In a section titled “The Facts,” the Washington Post reported:

Sanders said 500,000 people were driven to bankruptcy by medical bills. A Sanders campaign aide said he was relying on an editorial published by the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) in March [2019].

That study, led by David U. Himmelstein, took a sample of bankruptcy court filings from 2013 to 2016, identified 3,200 bankrupt debtors and mailed them a survey. The response rate was 29.4 percent, with 910 responses and 108 surveys returned as undeliverable.

Debtors were asked whether medical expenses, or loss of work related to illness, contributed to their bankruptcies. Of those who responded, 66.5 percent said at least one of those factors contributed “somewhat” or “very much.”

Sixty-six percent of 750,000 is 500,000, so Sanders’s math adds up at first glance.

The study referenced, “Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act,” was accepted by the American Journal of Public Health in November 2018 and published in February 2019. Sanders’ campaign website also hosted a page (“Medical Bankruptcy is Real, Even if the Washington Post Refuses to Believe it”) about the claim, controversy, and fact-check; the page was written by the study’s authors, Himmelstein et al.

The Washington Post fact-check noted that as an editorial, that particular AJPH article “did not undergo the same peer-reviewed editing process as a research article.” We were unable to find how they were able to make the determination that the article was not peer-reviewed.

The paper also posited that while the 66 percent of bankruptcies cited medical bills as a factor, other factors may have been involved:

This study includes a range of people for whom medical expenses or illness contributed “somewhat” to bankruptcy. What does “somewhat” mean? It’s broad enough to mean “slightly,” “fairly” or “moderately.” Sanders’s claim works only by erasing this ambiguity and taking “somewhat” to mean “mostly.”

In Sanders’ tweet, no qualifiers (like “mostly”) were used. He said “500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills,” a statement that could reasonably be framed to mean either that medical bills were a defining factor in bankruptcies, or that medical bills caused bankruptcies, or that medical bills were a contributing factor in bankruptcies.

Himmelstein was quoted by the paper in its attempt to assign a truth rating to the claim, and he explained that a number of confounding factors made sweeping statements difficult. Of note is that Himmelstein cited circumstances in which illness and mounting medical bills could drive other bankruptcy-exacerbating circumstances, such as work missed due to illness or compounding debt again related to health issues:

“We did not ask about the sole or main reason for bankruptcy, because our past experience indicates that this is a meaningless question,” Himmelstein, a professor at CUNY’s Hunter College who supports single-payer health care, wrote in an email. “The vast majority of debtors suffer multiple problems that bring them to file, and cannot identify a single problem among them. Thus, if an illness led to lost work time (and hence income) and medical bills, debtors cannot separate out these different problems; they are of a piece.”

Critics of Himmelstein and his colleagues’ research into medical bills and bankruptcy proposed different approaches, like “[instead of] looking at a sample of people who go bankrupt and see how many have medical debt, look at a sample of a bunch of people who have medical debt, and how many of them go bankrupt [to get an] idea of causality.” Another study cited a far lower number, while at the same time noting that the figure only involved debtors who had been hospitalized:

“Based on our estimate of 4 percent of bankruptcy filings per year and the approximately 800,000 bankruptcy filings per year, our number would be much closer to something on the order of 30,000-50,000 bankruptcies caused by a hospitalization,” one of the co-authors of the NEJM study, economist Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, wrote in an email.

“This would lead us to be skeptical of the 500,000 medical bankruptcies statistic, but that very much depends on how one defines a medical bankruptcy.…  An enormous share of households have some amount of medical debt, so any survey of individuals will report a high share of them have medical debt but this does not imply that the debt caused them to file for bankruptcy.”

Some people could still face high levels of medical debt without ever going through a hospital, and they wouldn’t be counted in the NEJM study.

The Washington Post asked Himmelstein directly if Sanders had accurately represented the findings of his and his colleagues’ editorial, to which he replied in the affirmative:

Himmelstein wrote: “37 percent of filers said medical bills ‘very much’ contributed to their bankruptcy. Even if you use that restricted definition, then Sanders’s statement is accurate — or an underestimate. There are about 700,000 bankruptcy filings each year. Many filings are joint husband/wife filings, and based on our past research, we estimate that on average 2.71 persons reside in each debtor’s household. So the total number of persons who undergo bankruptcy is about 1.9 million annually.

“37 percent of 1.9 million is a bit over 700,000. Even if you only count the husband and wife in a filing, the number suffering a bankruptcy to which medical bills ‘very much’ contributed is about 500,000.”

The fact-check then concluded that the claims constituted politically motivated “cherry-picking” over the researchers’ objections:

This is a classic case of cherry-picking a number from a scientific study and twisting it to make a political point.

An undated response from Himmelstein and Woolhandler appeared at the bottom of the post. The authors pointed out several objections to the fact-check and factors cited in it, writing:

An August 28 [2019] Fact Checker article in the Post assigned a “Three Pinocchios” rating to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ statement that 500,000 Americans are bankrupted by medical bills annually. Sanders’ estimate relied on an editorial by David Himmelstein and colleagues in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) reporting findings from a Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP) survey that asked debtors about causes of their bankruptcy. The editorial (which the Post falsely implied had not undergone peer review) updated previous CBP studies carried out by Himmelstein, along with then-Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, Steffie Woolhandler and Deborah Thorne that reached similar conclusions and appeared in leading medical and policy journals.

The Post’s denigration of Sanders’ statement rests on an econometric study that found only a modest uptick in bankruptcy filings among persons hospitalized in California between 2003 and 2007. As Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Warren noted in their response to that study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study excluded most persons with frequent hospitalizations (a group at high risk of medical bankruptcy); assumed that anyone not hospitalized could not suffer medical bankruptcy; that a child or partners’ illness couldn’t lead to bankruptcy; and that potentially bankrupting illnesses always commence at the moment of hospitalization – an assumption contradicted by the study’s own data.

Rather than checking facts, the Post has chosen one side in an ongoing and unsettled scholarly debate, and labeled those on the other side (and public figures who cite their research) “liars”.

More than 200 readers commented on the fact-check, most objecting to the paper’s dismissal of both the underlying research and the researchers’ responses. One commenter wrote:

I’m not a political supporter of Senator Sanders, I’m a retired former CEO of several significant medical device companies and the former Co-Chairman for eight years of the National Council for Healthcare Technology. The authors of the original editorial and its supporting peer reviewed studies, are the widely acknowledged preeminent experts in the field of medical bankruptcy, which they’ve been studying and publishing peer reviewed articles on for many years. The Washington Post’s reporter has substituted his uninformed judgement for the expertise, acquired over many years, by the authors of the original editorial and its supporting studies. As the authors pointed out in their rebuttal, Senator Sanders’s estimate of medical debt related bankruptcies is, if anything, to conservative. Medical debt related bankruptcies are a huge problem in the US, the only developed country in the world where they occur. The Washington Post is flat out wrong on this issue.

Another echoed:

How hard is it to retract this? I think we are being generous when we say the author made some mistakes here, I think it is pretty clear to anyone who pays attention what the intent of this “fact check” was, and that is to try and discredit Bernie Sanders in any way possible.

But you got called out on it by both Senator Sanders and the authors of the study he cited, now own up to it and retract it. If the WaPo had one shred of journalistic integrity, they would admit they were wrong and seek to correct it. All this does is damage the Post’s credibility going forward the longer they remain obstinate about this.

A third addressed a conclusory claim by the Post that Himmelstein somehow moved the goalposts on his own original claim, remarking on the inferences underlying the “mostly” aspect:

Is the WaPo serious here? The entire article is based on the fact checker’s claim that Sanders implied with his tweets “solely caused” instead of “one of the causes”. But him also saying “people(/Americans)” instead of “cases” isn’t relevant? The study refers to different contributions to bankruptcy. Which one are you proving false? If you are going off of the peer reviewed editorial it is talking about contribution and cases. If you are going off of Sander’s tweet, it’s cause and people. Himmelstein even gave you an easily verifiable fact as to how many people are experiencing bankruptcy per case. This article has many more basic logical inaccuracies, I just wanted to point out this blatant disregard of parallelism in fact checking.

That commenter’s critique was not restricted to one comment:

So…what is your point? Because health care costs may not be the sole reason for a person’s financial difficulties, it is wrong to point to them as a burden? Has WaPo never heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back?

We were unable to find commenters defending the amended fact-check, but we did find an additional comment signed by Himmelstein:

Although the Post agreed to post our brief letter responding to their column, it refused to include the names of the 101 additional colleagues who were signatories of that letter. David U. Himmelstein, MD and Steffie Woolhandler MD MPH

Clearly, Sanders’ claim (depicted in the January 12 2020 Facebook post above) that “500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills” (referencing 2019) was a point of contention, worsened by a widely-disputed Washington Post fact-check originally published on August 28 2019 — after Sanders’ tweet and a Democratic debate in which he referenced the same statistic. Normally, we turn to the source material to verify such debate — in this case, research published in a medical journal.

In a very odd turn of events, the authors of the article in the medical journal spoke up to insist their figures were accurately represented by Sanders in both places. In turn, the Washington Post added some of their objections (but not all), did not correct a claim that the editorial was not subjected to peer-review, and left out important elements of the authors’ response. Although the paper retained its “mostly false/three Pinocchios” rating, we were hard pressed to replicate those findings based on extensive comment from researchers whose peer-reviewed work had been published in medical journals.

Update, January 14 2020, 4:28 PM: Himmelstein responded quickly to our request for additional information, forwarding two documents. One was published to Sanders’ website and linked above.

The second was a letter to the editor — signed, as Himmelstein noted — by several parties. We are including both in their entirety. The first:

Medical Bankruptcy is Real, Even if the Washington Post Refuses to Believe it
David U. Himmelstein, M.D. and Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H

The Washington Post has broken new ground, calling a presidential candidate a liar for citing a statistic from research published in the world’s leading public health journal. ThePost’s Fact Checker column labeled Bernie Sanders a “three pinocchio” level liar for saying that 500,000 Americans are bankrupted by medical bills each year. Sanders’ statement relied on research that we and three colleagues published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). Dozens of politicians and publications (including the Post itself!) have cited that study as a reliable source.

Our AJPH study was part of an ongoing research effort by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP). For decades, the CBP has been surveying debtors about the causes (including medical ones) and consequences of their bankruptcy. In our 2019 research, 37.0% of bankrupts “very much” agreed that medical bills were an important factor, while another 21.5% “somewhat agreed”. Many others cited lost wages due to illness, and overall, two-thirds cited illness-related bills, income loss or both. As we wrote in the AJPH, that’s “. . . equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.” That figure is in line with estimates based on our earlier CBP studies (carried out with then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and sociologist Deborah Thorne), which were published in leading medical and policy journals.

But even the 530,000 figure is an underestimate of the number of people affected by medical bankruptcies. Most bankruptcies involve more than one person – an average of about 2.7 people, often including a spouse/partner and children. That means that the 750,000 bankruptcies last year involved more than 2 million people. And even if you usethe most restrictive definition of medical bankruptcy – i.e. including only debtors who “very much” agreed that medical bills were a cause of their bankruptcy – Sanders’ 500,000 figure is, if anything, too low. The right number is more like three quarters of a million.And our studies aren’t the only indictor that many American families suffer a crushing burden of medical bills. A Nobel Prize winner was forced to sell his medal to pay medical bills. More than 250 000 people sought to raise funds for medical bills through GoFundMe campaigns last year. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,medical bills account for more than half of all unpaid bills sent to collection agencies.

And in a New York Times/Kaiser Foundation survey, more than one quarter of respondents said they or someone in their household had a problem paying medical bills, and of them, 11% said they’d declared bankruptcy due, at least in part to medical bills.

So why did the Fact Checker claim that Sanders told a whopper? That claim rests on an econometric study that found only a modest uptick in bankruptcy filings among persons hospitalized in California between 2003 and 2007. But that study appeared tailor made toundercount medical bankruptcies. As we and Elizabeth Warren noted in our response to it in the New England Journal of Medicine, it excluded most people who were frequently hospitalized (a group that’s at high risk of medical bankruptcy); it assumed that anyone not hospitalized could not suffer medical bankruptcy (even though people who aren’t hospitalized in the course of a year account for four-fifths of all out-of-pocket medical bills); that no one is bankrupted by bills for a child’s or partners’ care; and that potentially bankrupting illnesses never start before the moment of hospitalization – an assumption contradicted by the study’s own data.

Yet despite these flaws, the economists behind the study insisted (and the Post believed) that their math was a more reliable indicator of what caused financial ruin than the testimony (and court records that we’ve used as cross-check) from the thousands of debtors surveyed and interviewed by the CBP.

At this point everyone agrees that many thousands of Americans suffer medical bankruptcies each year, but there’s still scholarly debate over exactly how many; economists and business school professors (including some funded by the health insurance industry) generally offer lower estimates, and medical and legal researchers find higher numbers, We’d be happy to see the Post report the facts and nuances of that debate. But instead it’s chosen a side and labeled those on the other side – researchers, public figures who cite their research, and the debtors who shared their painful stories – “liars”.

David U. Himmelstein, M.D. and Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H. are both Distinguished Professors of Public Health, City University of New York at Hunter College and Lecturers in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.

As Himmelstein’s comment in the comments section of the Post article maintained, all of the many additional signatories of the letter had been stripped in the appended portion. We have included them below, in the full text of the second document:

To the Editor:

An August 28 Fact Checker article in the Post assigned a “three pinocchios” rating to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ statement that 500,000 Americans are bankrupted by medical bills annually. Sanders’ estimate relied on an editorial by David Himmelstein and colleagues in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) reporting findings from a Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP) survey that asked debtors about causes of their bankruptcy. The editorial (which the Post falsely implied had not undergone peer review) updated previous CBP studies carried out by Himmelstein, along with then-Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, Steffie Woolhandler and Deborah Thorne that reached similar conclusions and appeared in leading medical and policy journals.

The Post’s denigration of Sanders’ statement rests on an econometric study that found only a modest uptick in bankruptcy filings among persons hospitalized in California between 2003 and -2007. As Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Warren noted in their response to that study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study excluded most persons with frequent hospitalizations (a group at high risk of medical bankruptcy); assumed that anyone not hospitalized could not suffer medical bankruptcy; that a child or partners’ illness couldn’t lead to bankruptcy; and that potentially bankrupting illnesses always commence at the moment of hospitalization – an assumption contradicted by the study’s own data.

Rather than checking facts, the Post has chosen one side in an ongoing and unsettled scholarly debate, and labeled those on the other side (and public figures who cite their research) “liars”.

Sincerely,

David U. Himmelstein, MD
Distinguished Professor
Hunter College at City University of New York
Lecturer in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Steffie Woolhandler MD MPH
Distinguished Professor
Hunter College at City University of New York
Lecturer (formerly Professor) in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Mary T. Bassett MD MPH
Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard
Former New York City Commissioner of Health

Robert Pollin, PhD
Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director
Political Economy Research Institute
University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

David H. Bor, MD
Chief Academic Officer
Cambridge Health Alliance
Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School

Steven B. Auerbach, MD MPH
Retired-CAPT U.S. Public Health Service/ Dept. of Health & Human Services

Ashwini Sehgal, MD
Duncan Neuhauser Professor of Community Health Improvement
Co-Director, Center for Reducing Health Disparities
Case Western Reserve University

Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH
Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health
New York University

Arthur MacEwan
Professor Emeritus of Economics
University of Massachusetts Boston

Howard Waitzkin, MD, PhD, FACP
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
University of New Mexico
Visiting Professor, Fulbright Senior Fellow
Seoul National University School of Public Health
Division of Health Care Management and Policy

Karen Lasser, MD, MPH
Professor of Medicine and Public Health
Boston University

Joia S. Mukherjee, MD, MPH
Chief Medical Officer,
Partners In Health
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School

Priyank Jain, MD
Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School

Mardge H. Cohen, MD
Boston Health Care for the Homeless
Boston University

Gordon Schiff, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Sonali Saluja, MD, MPH
University of Southern California School of Medicine

Sabrina A. Esbitt, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Family & Social Medicine
Montefiore Medical Center/ Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Zinzi Bailey, PhD
University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine

Karen A. Becker, MD, MPH
Associate Professor, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Iman Hassan MD MS
Montefiore Health System/Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Carles Muntaner MD, PhD, MHS.
Professor of Public Health, Nursing and Psychiatry
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Henry S Kahn, MD, FACP
Professor Emeritus
Emory University School of Medicine

Scott Goldberg, MD
Bronx, NY

Lara Goitein, M.D
Santa Fe, NM

Vikas Saini, MD, F.A.C.C.
President, Lown Institute

Joe de Jonge
Medical Student, Columbia University

David Ozonoff, MD, MPH
Professor of Environmental Health
Boston University School of Public Health

Linda Prine MD
Professor of Family Medicine
Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Merlin Chowkwanyun, PhD
Assistant Professor of Public Health
Mailman/Columbia University School of Public Health

Matt Anderson, MD
Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine

Sheba Sethi, MD
Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine

Christopher J. Wong, MD
University of Washington School of Medicine

Richard J. Pels, MD
Chief of Medicine
Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School

Kathleen Hanley, MD
Associate Professor
NYU School of Medicine

Mark Eisenberg, MD
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Adam Gaffney, MD MPH
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School
President, Physicians for a National Health Program

Joel Lexchin MD
Professor Emeritus
School of Health Policy & Management
York University
Toronto Ontario, Canada

Paul Song, MD
Los Angeles, CA

Pieter Cohen, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine
Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School

Lipi Roy, MD, MPH, FASAM
New York City

Heather Paladine, MD
Residency Director
Family Medicine Residency Program
New York Presbyterian/ Columbia University Medical Center

Martha Livingston, PhD
Professor and Chair, Public Health
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Martin F. Shapiro, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine
Weill Cornell Medical College

Dan O’Connell, MD MPH
Asst. Prof Family Medicine, Albert Einstein School of Medicine

Victoria Gorski, MD, FAAFP
Associate Clinical Professor
Department of Family and Social Medicine
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein
College of Medicine

Alec Feuerbach
Medical student
Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Gabriel Silversmith, MD, MS
New York City

A.H. Strelnick, MD
Associate Dean and Professor, Family & Social Medicine
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Montefiore Medical Center

Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc, FRCP, OC
Distinguished University Professor
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Lew Pepper, MD MPH
Newton, MA

Nancy Krieger, PhD
Professor of Social Epidemiology
American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Michael A. Zingman, MPH
MD Candidate, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons

Garrett Adams, MD, MPH
Past President, Physicians for National Health Program
Louisville, KY

Ellen Benoit, PhD
New York City

Joanna Watterson
Medical Student

Philip Verhoef, MD
University of Chicago School of Medicine

Deborah Thorne, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Idaho

Leo Eisenstein, MD
Bellevue Hospital/NYU School of Medicine

Vikas Gampa, MD
Cambridge, MA

Margot Smith, DrPH
Berkeley, CA

Catherine DeLorey, PhD
Women’s Health Institute
Boston, MA

Martin Donohoe MD FACP
Portland State University

Richard N. Gottfried
Chair, New York State Assembly Health Committee

Rachel Madley
PhD Candidate
Columbia University Medical Center

Tom Lieb, MD
Portland, OR 97213

William M. Fogarty, Jr., MD
Webster Groves, MO

Ed Weisbart, MD, CPE, FAAFP
St. Louis, Missouri

Kenneth D. Rosenberg, MD, MPH
Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health

Airín D. Martínez, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Public Health and Health Sciences
University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Mark S. Krasnoff, MD FACP
St. Louis, MO

Andrew Goldstein, MD.
New York, NY

Aaron D. Fox, MD MS
Associate Professor of Medicine
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Sam Dickman, MD
University of California San Francisco

Christine Jacobs MD
Professor and Department Chair
Family and Community Medicine
St. Louis University

Rachel Kreier, PhD
Associate professor, health economics
Saint Joseph’s College
Patchogue, NY

Robert E Aronson, DrPH, MPH
Professor and Director, Public Health Program
Department of Environmental Science, Public Health and Sustainable Development
Taylor University
Upland, IN

Michael Hochman, MD, MPH
Director, USC Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science
Keck Medicine of USC

Kevin Grumbach, MD
Hellman Endowed Professor and Chair
Department of Family and Community Medicine
University of California San Francisco

Olveen Carrasquillo, MD MPH
Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences
Chief, Division of General Internal Medicine
University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine

Paul O’Rourke-Babb, MSN, FNP-C
Chico, CA

William Honigman, M.D.
Orange County, CA

Tom Koren, PT
San Francisco, CA

Noralou Roos, O.C., PhD
Professor, University of Mannitoba

Harvey M. Weinstein, MD, MPH
Senior Research Fellow, Human Rights Center, Berkeley Law

Corinne Frugoni M.D.
Humboldt County, CA

Marc Sapir MD, MPH
Hayward, CA

Henry L. Abrons, MD, MPH
Berkeley, CA

Jay Bowman-Kirigin
MD/PhD student, Washington University, St. Louis

Jessica Schorr Saxe, MD
Charlotte, NC

Leonard Rodberg, PhD
Professor Emeritus, Queens College/City University of New York

Marce Abare, MD
San Jose, CA

Ruth Wangerin, PhD, MPH
Lehman College, City University of New York

J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Judy Norsigian, Board Chair, on behalf of Our Bodies and Ourselves

Russell Phillips, M,.D.
William Applebaum Professor of Medicine; Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and Director of the Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School

Marcia Angell, M.D.
Former Editor-in-chief, New England Journal of Medicine

Affiliations are for identification only