And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt say they don't expect to ever pay it off. Logan's newfound freedom from medical debt is reviving a long-dormant dream to sing on stage. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt to pay. Now a single mother of two, she describes the strain of living with debt hanging over her head. "We wanted to eliminate at least one stressor of avoidance to get people in the doors to get the care that they need, " says Dawn Casavant, chief of philanthropy at Heywood. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1.
We want to talk to every hospital that's interested in retiring debt. He is a longtime advocate for the poor in Appalachia, where he grew up and where he says chronic disease makes medical debt much worse. Soon after giving birth to a daughter two months premature, Terri Logan received a bill from the hospital. "So nobody can come to us, raise their hand, and say, 'I'd like you to relieve my debt, '" she says. As NPR and KHN have reported, more than half of U. adults say they've gone into debt in the past five years because of medical or dental bills, according to a KFF poll. Plus, she says, "it's likely that that debt would not have been collected anyway. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt to one. Sesso says the group is constantly looking for new debt to buy from hospitals: "Call us! For Terri Logan, the former math teacher, her outstanding medical bills added to a host of other pressures in her life, which then turned into debilitating anxiety and depression. RIP is one of the only ways patients can get immediate relief from such debt, says Jim Branscome, a major donor. "We prefer the hospitals reduce the need for our work at the back end, " she says. New regulations allow RIP to buy loans directly from hospitals, instead of just on the secondary market, expanding its access to the debt. That money enabled RIP to hire staff and develop software to comb through databases and identify targeted debt faster.
She was a single mom who knew she had no way to pay. Terri Logan (right) practices music with her daughter, Amari Johnson (left), at their home in Spartanburg, S. C. When Logan's daughter was born premature, the medical bills started pouring in and stayed with her for years. "I don't know; I just lost my mojo, " she says. Rukavina says state laws should force hospitals to make better use of their financial assistance programs to help patients. But many eligible patients never find out about charity care — or aren't told. Numerous factors contribute to medical debt, he says, and many are difficult to address: rising hospital and drug prices, high out-of-pocket costs, less generous insurance coverage, and widening racial inequalities in medical debt. What triggered the change of heart for Ashton was meeting activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 who talked to him about how to help relieve Americans' debt burden. The "pandemic has made it simply much more difficult for people running up incredible medical bills that aren't covered, " Branscome says. 7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt relief. RIP Medical Debt does. RIP CEO Sesso says the group is advising hospitals on how to improve their internal financial systems so they better screen patients eligible for charity care — in essence, preventing people from incurring debt in the first place. RIP bestows its blessings randomly. Sesso says it just depends on which hospitals' debts are available for purchase.
Juan Diego Reyes for KHN and NPR. Ultimately, that's a far better outcome, she says. The pandemic, Branscome adds, exacerbated all of that. Then, a few months ago, she discovered a nonprofit had paid off her debt. "I avoided it like the plague, " she says, but avoidance didn't keep the bills out of mind. "Hospitals shouldn't have to be paid, " he says. RIP buys the debts just like any other collection company would — except instead of trying to profit, they send out notices to consumers saying that their debt has been cleared. "A lot of damage will have been done by the time they come in to relieve that debt, " says Mark Rukavina, a program director for Community Catalyst, a consumer advocacy group. "As a bill collector collecting millions of dollars in medical-associated bills in my career, now all of a sudden I'm reformed: I'm a predatory giver, " Ashton said in a video by Freethink, a new media journalism site. "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. Sesso emphasizes that RIP's growing business is nothing to celebrate. Logan, who was a high school math teacher in Georgia, shoved it aside and ignored subsequent bills. They are billed full freight and then hounded by collection agencies when they don't pay. The three major credit rating agencies recently announced changes to the way they will report medical debt, reducing its harm to credit scores to some extent.
They started raising money from donors to buy up debt on secondary markets — where hospitals sell debt for pennies on the dollar to companies that profit when they collect on that debt. "They would have conversations with people on the phone, and they would understand and have better insights into the struggles people were challenged with, " says Allison Sesso, RIP's CEO. Some hospitals say they want to alleviate that destructive cycle for their patients. It undermines the point of care in the first place, he says: "There's pressure and despair. Most hospitals in the country are nonprofit and in exchange for that tax status are required to offer community benefit programs, including what's often called "charity care. " Terri Logan says no one mentioned charity care or financial assistance programs to her when she gave birth. Yet RIP is expanding the pool of those eligible for relief. The medical debt that followed Logan for so many years darkened her spirits.
This time, it was a very different kind of surprise: "Wait, what? "But I'm kinda finding it, " she adds. 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. She had panic attacks, including "pain that shoots up the left side of your body and makes you feel like you're about to have an aneurysm and you're going to pass out, " she recalls. "The weight of all of that medical debt — oh man, it was tough, " Logan says. Depending on the hospital, these programs cut costs for patients who earn as much as two to three times the federal poverty level. Eventually, they realized they were in a unique position to help people and switched gears from debt collection to philanthropy. 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. Nor did Logan realize help existed for people like her, people with jobs and health insurance but who earn just enough money not to qualify for support like food stamps. One criticism of RIP's approach has been that it isn't preventive; the group swoops in after what can be years of financial stress and wrecked credit scores that have damaged patients' chances of renting apartments or securing car loans. After helping Occupy Wall Street activists buy debt for a few years, Antico and Ashton launched RIP Medical Debt in 2014.