• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Nobody commenting is reading the article.

    The headline suggests that medical bills drove them into poverty so much so that he’s had to be driving for Uber at 76. Thats not the case, and the article lays it all out.

    It looks like about 25 years after the medical bills wiped them out financially, they recovered financially:

    I really didn’t want to retire in my 60s, but we were getting older, and my wife wanted me to be spending more time at home. When I retired, I had some equity in my home and around $300,000 in my IRA. I also started to fund an IRA for my wife, which I built to mid-five figures. This allowed us to travel extensively within the US for the first few years. But a part of me felt like we probably weren’t going to live that long anyway because everybody around us was dying.

    We should be celebrating two things:

    • the fact that the ACA passed into law and that what happened to this couple in the 1990s can’t happen again under today’s law
    • the hard work they did rebuilding financially to have over $350k in savings + home equity and have have a comfortable retirement to be able to afford extensive travel they did in retirement.