Over the last 50 years, our nation's productivity tripled. The Dow Jones industrial average ballooned over the same period, growing from an average of 1,000 in 1970 to between 10,000 and 14,000 over the last decade. There are more billionaires and millionaires alive today than there were during the last 100 years combined. We can process, send, and retrieve information at a speed unthinkable even two decades ago. The typical middle-class family can point to more than one car in the garage and multiple television sets in the house. We have more stuff, and more people have this stuff than ever before.

As health-care costs continue to climb, the trend to more "cost sharing" continues, and the ranks of the uninsured keep swelling, more and more Americans are finding that paying for medical care means going into debt. The latest study by the Commonwealth Fund found that one out of five Americans have medical debt -- a population that includes many individuals with health insurance. In fact, nearly two-thirds of people who reported being in debt or having problems with medical bills had health insurance at the time the bill was incurred. Medical debt doesn't discriminate by race or class either, though like other economic forces, it disproportionately impacts lower-income individuals and individuals of color.