It’s not something he is required to ask about, but Paul Hunt knows that at least some of the people who seek help at Ballard Community Center are saddled with medical debts.

It’s a subject that often comes up when he talks to families about debt problems, said Hunt, resources director at the North Lawrence center.

“Especially when someone is in a lot of pain or in an emergency situation,” he said. “A lot of folks say, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll worry about how to pay for it later.'”

A new report released Thursday states that medical debt is becoming commonplace in Kansas. Yet most people, whether they have health insurance or not, try to use whatever resources are available to reduce or pay off medical debt, even if it means switching that debt to a credit card.

“The magnitude of the problem and the additional barriers to medical care caused by medical debt are overwhelming,” said Lougene Marsh, director of Flint Hills Community Health Center under the Lyon County Health Department.

Marsh was one of the health care officials who spoke during a statewide telephone news conference to announce the findings of a survey researched by The Access Project, a national research and health advocacy organization, and Brandeis University. The study was financed through grants from United Methodist Health Ministry Fund and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The survey was conducted from May to August 2005 at four community health centers in Wichita, Garden City and Emporia. Responses about medical debt were collected from 1,000 people with incomes of less than $25,000. Medical debt came from sources that included hospitals, physicians, dentists, prescription medications and ambulance services.

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• Access Project Web site

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents in the survey had medical debt and every race and ethnic group was affected whether they were insured or not.

“Something’s wrong when so many people use up their hard-earned savings, borrow from friends, take out loans and jeopardize their credit in order to pay medical bills,” said Kim Moore, president of the Health Ministry Fund.

Medical debt often hinders people from getting additional medical treatment and causes credit problems, the survey found.

That finding doesn’t surprise Laurel McElvain, director of Heartland Medical Clinic, 1 Riverfront Plaza. On Thursday she took a telephone call from a woman in Miami County who had serious debt problems.

“She was just calling around trying to find a clinic that would help her,” McElvain said.

McElvain doesn’t know how many of the clinic’s patients carry medical debt. Just as at the Ballard Center, that is information the clinic doesn’t require to provide low-cost care to those without insurance.

The report makes several recommendations for rectifying the medical debt problem. Among them are expanding “safety-net clinics” such as Heartland; restricting the reporting of medical debt to credit agencies; and to provide financial counseling to patients facing unaffordable medical expenses.

In addition, Kansas Health Consumer Coalition will be organizing advocacy groups throughout the state to find out what concerns and priorities exist among people with medical debt, coalition director Laurie Dale Marshall said. It also will work with the groups to find effective solutions to medical debt at community and state levels, she said.

“The fact that so many Kansans with health insurance have crippling medical debt is a symptom of a health insurance system in need of repair,” Marshall said.