Good morning. Welcome, Axios today. It's Tuesday, August 22. I'm Nyla Boudou.

Today, we follow our teacher shortage reporting with teachers' own stories. Plus, a lack of bus drivers

adds to the back to school chaos. But first, why middle-class Americans are saddled with the most

medical debt? That's today's one big thing. Yesterday, we talked about the new levels of credit

card debt across America. Well, at least 100 million Americans have some sort of medical debt,

that's according to KFF, but the group with the highest rates of medical debt might surprise you.

Nearly one in four middle-class Americans, that's people who earn between 50 to $100,000 a year,

have unpaid medical bills, according to a new report from the Think Tank Third Way.

Axios' Tina Reed is here with the big picture. Hi, Tina. Hi, Nyla. Why is it that middle-class

Americans have the highest rates of medical debt? So, this report found that the middle-class

were more likely than those with lower incomes to actually seek care, but they were less likely to

be able to pay those bills than those with higher incomes, who also tend to have better health

insurance coverage. So, does the amount of debt vary for middle-class individuals when you think

about age or race or education level? There were some great disparities when we look at this data,

younger people, we're more likely than older people to have debt in the middle class.

In particular, we saw when folks hit Medicare age 65 and older, this was less of a phenomena.

We saw that black and Hispanic middle-class people were more likely than white middle-class

people to have medical debt. In fact, the report found that 37.5% of the black middle-class

have medical debt, well, it found only 20.4% of white middle-class people have medical debt.

So, the differences are quite stark. And what is medical debt like for lower income Americans?

So, the authors are quick to point out that this says a lot about low-income Americans as much as

it does about middle-class when it comes to medical debt because people with lower incomes are

...