The fur is flying at Health Affairs over medical bankruptcy rate.(Health Affairs)

A debate over degrees of the obvious-a link between soaring healthcare costs and personal bankruptcies-has turned into a tag-team grudge match in the normally staid world of the policy journal Health Affairs.

The academic schoolyard scrap dates to February 2005 when Harvard researchers David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler released a study in the journal that concluded nearly 46% of the 1.45 million Americans who filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2001 experienced circumstances that met at least one of the authors' criteria for a "major medical bankruptcy.''

In a rebuttal posted Feb. 28, conservative Northwestern University scholars David Dranove and Michael Millenson argue that only 17% of those surveyed by Himmelstein and Woolhandler experienced bankruptcies that were truly caused by medical …