If you have a stroke, heart disease, diabetes or any other serious issue that lands you in the hospital for any substantive amount of time, your medical bills just may bankrupt you.

A new study in The American Journal of Medicine shows that nearly two out of three — two out of three! — bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. And that number doesn’t even take into account today’s economic malaise. Even if you have health insurance, you’re not out of the woods. You still could meet your financial demise with that quasi-safety net, since the average bills were only about $10,000 less than those of the uninsured. In fact, in 2007, of those who filed for bankruptcy, about 80 percent had insurance. Consider these numbers: In 2007, medical problems contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies, and during the six years prior, the proportion of all medical-related bankruptcies rose by about 50 percent. Many others had to file because they lost much of their income due to illness, or mortgaged a home to pay their doctor’s bills. And these people aren’t poor — most, in fact, were well-educated, middle-class homeowners.

The Washington Post has the full study here. The New York Times notes that the health problems that left patients with the most out-of-pocket expenses were:

Neurologic (i.e., multiple sclerosis): $34,167
Diabetes: $26,971
Injuries: $25,096
Stroke: $23,380
Mental illnesses: $23,178
Heart disease: $21,955

"Our findings are frightening. Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said lead study author Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

With scary numbers like that in mind, President Obama and Congress have big plans to overhaul the nation’s health-care system. But there seems to be a conflict between Republicans and Democrats over whether to include a "public option" in the bill — a government-run insurance program that would compete with private plans. That public plan would be similar to Medicare and would cover Americans who don’t have private insurance. President Obama and Democrats support the idea, but Republicans oppose the public option, and there’s no agreement on how to pay for it. One way may be to take $200 billion to $300 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next decade. There could be other cutbacks, as well.

“If we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable,” Obama wrote in a letter to Congress.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said health-care reform is a great idea, but the "devil is in the details."

"Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves," Krugman wrote in The New York Times today. His advice to Congress? "Don’t trust the insurance industry," and "Don’t trust the insurance industry."