They began as debt collectors, trying to get people burdened by medical costs to pay up. But the conversations they had persuaded them to do something else — something better. Through listening to people explain their struggles, Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton “would understand and have better insights into the struggles people were challenged with,” said the CEO of the nonprofit they founded, RIP Medical Debt.
The Occupy Wall Street movement helped change Ashton. In 2011, activists from the group urged him to help relieve Americans of their debt, not pursue them for it. “As a bill collector collecting millions of dollars in medical-associated bills in my career, now all of a sudden I’m reformed,” Ashton said. “I’m a predatory giver.”
Since he and Antico founded the organization in 2014, it’s bought $6.7 billion of medical debt and paid it off for 3.6 million people. Buying $100 in debt costs about $1. Most buyers then try to collect the debt, making more profit the more people they can badger into paying. RIP Medical Debt does the opposite.
According to Kaiser Health News, over half of Americans have gone into medical or dental debt in the last five years, and a quarter of those owe over $5,000. A fifth of those in debt don’t think they can ever pay it. Some in debt don’t get treatment they need because they don’t want to fall further behind. Many suffer chronic illnesses that will need regular treatment for the rest of their lives. And many people can’t afford health insurance and have to hope they don’t get sick or injured. All this has been a problem for many years, but the pandemic made it much worse.
The effects of medical debt on credit scores go even farther. People may not be able to get apartments or car loans. Without places to live and way to get around, they can’t get jobs. Their debt keeps increasing, and their ability to ever escape it disappears, simply because they had the bad luck of getting sick or having a child or other dependent get seriously ill.
Health care is a basic need. It is an inelastic demand, in economists’ terms: The demand remains the same no matter the price. Faced with the choice of serious disability (or even dying) and going into debt, anyone will take the risk. No one can blame them.
Groups like RIP Medical Debt do a great service to millions of Americans, but they can’t help everyone who needs relief. And even those they help have to suffer the financial effects and the stress and anxiety of years of being in debt.
This points, yet again, to the need for deep changes in the American health care system. We can’t rely on people like Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton to change their lives in a way that changes other peoples’ lives. We need a system that doesn’t require such people, though we’re fortunate to have them now.
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