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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/rip-medical-debt-forgives-billions-of-dollars/>
"Soon after giving birth to a daughter two months premature, Terri Logan
received a bill from the hospital. She recoiled from the string of numbers
separated by commas.
Logan, who was a high school math teacher in Georgia, shoved it aside and
ignored subsequent bills. She was a single mom who knew she had no way to pay.
“I avoided it like the plague,” she said, but avoidance didn’t keep the bills
out of mind.
“The weight of all of that medical debt — oh man, it was tough,” Logan said.
“Every day, I’m thinking about what I owe, how I’m going to get out of this …
especially with the money coming in just not being enough.”
Then a few months ago — nearly 13 years after her daughter’s birth and many
anxiety attacks later — Logan received some bright yellow envelopes in the
mail. They were from a nonprofit group telling her it had bought and then
forgiven all those past medical bills.
This time, it was a very different kind of surprise: “Wait, what? Who does
that?”
RIP Medical Debt does. The nonprofit has boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic,
freeing patients of medical debt, thousands of people at a time. Its novel
approach involves buying bundles of delinquent hospital bills — debts incurred
by low-income patients like Logan — and then simply erasing the obligation to
repay them.
It’s a model developed by two former debt collectors, Craig Antico and Jerry
Ashton, who built their careers chasing down patients who couldn’t afford their
bills."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
