More and more United States citizens confront with a financial problem, which is the rising burden of unpaid medical bills, The New York Times reported.

Two studies conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change and the Kaiser Family Foundation were released last week to offer up-to-date data on the toll that medical care is placing on working American families, even on those who have been insured.

According to Drew E. Altman, the head of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit, private operating foundation which studies health policy, the difficulties Americans are facing while paying for health care and health insurance are “central dimension of the economic and pocketbook concerns right now.” 

Whereas policy analysts recognize the fact that finding any finances to increase coverage may be a difficult task, there are voices claiming that the terms of the discussion may modify since policy makers and the public are rethinking their positions on the need for guidelines and the role the government has in the industry field (including the health care area). “We can now imagine a government takeover that we could not imagine before,” said Len M. Nichols, director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute that promotes pioneering political solutions transcending conventional party lines.

Big companies still make up an important source of coverage and the studies drew attention to the expanding partition between employees working for large employers and those working at small companies with fewer than 200 subordinate employees.