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The pandemic, Branscome adds, exacerbated all of that. "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. Soon after giving birth to a daughter two months premature, Terri Logan received a bill from the hospital. However, consumers often take out second mortgages or credit cards to pay for medical services. 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. Terri Logan says no one mentioned charity care or financial assistance programs to her when she gave birth. 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. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt to improve. Her first performance is scheduled for this summer. "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.
The debt shadowed her, darkening her spirits. We want to talk to every hospital that's interested in retiring debt. As NPR and KHN have reported, more than half of U. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt to become. adults say they've gone into debt in the past five years because of medical or dental bills, according to a KFF poll. 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. 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. " 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. "I avoided it like the plague, " she says, but avoidance didn't keep the bills out of mind.
She recoiled from the string of numbers separated by commas. "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. "Basically: Don't reward bad behavior. Linkle uses her body to pay her debt to increase. Sesso emphasizes that RIP's growing business is nothing to celebrate. New regulations allow RIP to buy loans directly from hospitals, instead of just on the secondary market, expanding its access to the debt. A surge in recent donations — from college students to philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who gave $50 million in late 2020 — is fueling RIP's expansion. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1.
Logan's newfound freedom from medical debt is reviving a long-dormant dream to sing on stage. "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. That money enabled RIP to hire staff and develop software to comb through databases and identify targeted debt faster. To date, RIP has purchased $6. Now a single mother of two, she describes the strain of living with debt hanging over her head. Some hospitals say they want to alleviate that destructive cycle for their patients. And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt say they don't expect to ever pay it off.
7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3. "I would say hospitals are open to feedback, but they also are a little bit blind to just how poorly some of their financial assistance approaches are working out. They were from a nonprofit group telling her it had bought and then forgiven all those past medical bills. Plus, she says, "it's likely that that debt would not have been collected anyway. "So nobody can come to us, raise their hand, and say, 'I'd like you to relieve my debt, '" she says. "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. It means that millions of people have fallen victim to a U. S. insurance and health care system that's simply too expensive and too complex for most people to navigate. 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. But many eligible patients never find out about charity care — or aren't told. 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. The nonprofit has boomed during the pandemic, freeing patients of medical debt, thousands of people at a time.
Sesso said that with inflation and job losses stressing more families, the group now buys delinquent debt for those who make as much as four times the federal poverty level, up from twice the poverty level. RIP Medical Debt does. 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. 6 million people of debt. Sesso says it just depends on which hospitals' debts are available for purchase.
Juan Diego Reyes for KHN and NPR. It undermines the point of care in the first place, he says: "There's pressure and despair. Then, a few months ago, she discovered a nonprofit had paid off her debt. Ultimately, that's a far better outcome, she says. After helping Occupy Wall Street activists buy debt for a few years, Antico and Ashton launched RIP Medical Debt in 2014.
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. "We prefer the hospitals reduce the need for our work at the back end, " she says. Depending on the hospital, these programs cut costs for patients who earn as much as two to three times the federal poverty level. 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. "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.