Americans owe $220 billion in medical debt, according to a federal survey. It’s one reason health care and affordability are key issues in the upcoming midterm elections and top of mind for people like Brittany Gurney.
In September of 2020, her 14-month-old son Jaxon was rushed to the hospital with a bowel obstruction that required nine surgeries in three months and a lengthy stay in the hospital.
“To this day, the surgeon has no idea why it happened,” said Gurney, a divorced mother of two from Mesa, Arizona.
The medical emergency came as a surprise, and Gurney knew the ordeal would be expensive, even with health insurance. Her portion of the $2 million hospital bill came out to $15,000.
“I can’t do that,” Gurney recalled thinking when she got the bill. “I’ve just missed so much work.”
At first, she paid whatever she could afford, maybe $50 a month. But the bills piled up, and she couldn’t pay. The debt went to collections. Her credit score fell 300 points. And then, one day earlier this year, a letter arrived in the mail.
It said her remaining debt had been forgiven. “I thought it was fake,” she said.
It wasn’t.
The letter came from a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt. The group buys up bundles of debt for pennies on the dollar.
“One dollar gets rid of $100 of medical debt,” said CEO Allison Sesso. “People not believing the letter is one of the biggest problems that we have. So if you get one of these letters, look for it and believe it. It’s real.”
Sesso said buying bundles of cheap debt is possible because debt collectors know that for most people, the ability to pay the full amount is “very low or non-existent.”
Medical debt is common in this country. Up to 100 million Americans, or 41% of adults, have racked up unpaid medical bills, according to a 2022 investigation by KFF News and NPR.
Sesso said recent actions by Congress will make the problem worse. Cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will reduce access to health insurance for millions of people.
“This is not the fault of the individual,” she added. “It’s really a broken system.”
Across the country, states like Delaware, Connecticut and New Jersey have paired up with Sesso’s group to take a bite out of the problem.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear announced last month the state would spend $2.5 million to cancel medical debt for 130,000 people. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat up for re-election, said she’d spend $10 million of unused pandemic relief money to do the same.
“As costs rise across the board due to senseless policies from Washington, this program is giving so many Arizonans the relief that they deserve,” said Hobbs at a press conference in August with Gurney standing by her side.
Lawmakers from both parties have tried to rein in medical debt, and polls show it is a bipartisan concern. But it’s unclear how much impact debt cancelation has on people’s lives, said Wesley Yin, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He and a team of researchers analyzed financial data from a large pool of people who received medical debt relief. The research found access to credit improved about 10%, “a modest but sizable impact,” Yin said. However, he added that debt collectors have become less likely to report medical debt to credit agencies, which reduces the impact.
Yin said that people who receive medical debt relief also tend to accrue more medical debt.
Perhaps most surprising, Yin said his team’s research didn’t reveal any lasting emotional benefits. “We show no measurable impacts on depression, anxiety, self-reported sense of well-being,” he said.
Those findings came from a limited number of surveys, but it’s possible that canceling years-old debt that people never planned to repay anyway is less impactful than offering financial assistance when they arrive at the hospital, Yin said.
In other words, debt forgiveness doesn’t address the root cause.
Six years after his life-or-death medical crisis, Jaxon, Gurney’s son, is healthy. Working for a hospital, she understands the structural issues behind ballooning medical debt. Americans spend more on health care than any other wealthy country, and having insurance does not fully protect people from the mounting costs.
“It’s a difficult topic because there’s no fixing it,” Gurney said. “It’s really all about money, and you can’t defeat it.”
Still, she’s grateful for the doctors who saved her son’s life and for the debt relief that came years later. “There’s definitely light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
Here & Now’s Ashley Locke contributed to this report.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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