The mountain of medical bills the average America is trying to clear is high. Medical debt contributes to two-thirds of bankruptcies, according to the American Journal of Public Health. And a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation/New York Times poll showed that of the 26% of people who reported problems paying medical bills, 59% reported a major life impact, such as taking an extra job, cutting other household spending or using up savings.
Several churches all over the country have come together and joined with a non-profit organization to clear these outstanding medical debts.
Megachurch Crossroads Church in Cincinnati partnered with RIP Medical Debt—an organization that purchases debt from collection agencies and forgives or “abolishes” it—to wipe out debts for people in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana. The debt was $46.5 Million dollars for roughly 4,500 family. The families will receive bright yellow envelopes this week letting them know the good news.
Trinity United Church of Christ, Covenant United Church of Christ, St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, Greater St. John Bible Church, and more (over 6,000 churchgoers) worked with nonprofit RIP Medical Debt as well to wipe out $5.3 million in medical debt.
“People don’t know that they’re going to receive this,” Trinity’s Rev. Otis Moss III, who co-sponsored the direct community action with Rev. Traci Blackmon, said. “And it’s my imagination that there will be 5,888 families in Cook County that will be shouting and thanking God that their debt has been forgiven.”
The Chicago Tribune reports that Blackmon, who is the Associate General Minister of Justice & Local Church Ministries for The United Church of Christ, and Senior Pastor of Christ The King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri, came up with the idea to partner with RIP Medical Debt. She and other church leaders urged parishioners to bring the money from the bottom of their purses or coin jars, and by September, they had raised the money needed to buy the medical debt for pennies on the dollar.
“Our efforts in the Chicago area serve as a launching pad, in collaboration with the UCC’s 38 conferences and almost 5,000 congregations, to medical debt relief efforts for those living at or below poverty in the 44 states we currently serve,” Blackmon said. “We view this ministry as one that also embodies what it means to love God, love our neighbors and proclaim Good News to the poor, whether they worship in our churches or not.”
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule in May to curb debt collectors’ ability to…
… bug those with outstanding bills, and some states have tried various measures, such as limiting the interest rates collectors may charge. But until a comprehensive solution emerges, churches and others are trying to ease some of the load by jumping into the debt market.
A big part of RIP’s appeal comes from the impact even a small donation can have, say participating church leaders. When a person can’t pay a bill, that debt is often packaged with other people’s debt and sold to bill collectors for some fraction of the total amount of the bill. Those debts usually come from low-income people and are more difficult to collect.
RIP Medical Debt buys debt portfolios on this secondary market for pennies on the dollar with money from its donors. But instead of collecting the debt, RIP forgives it.
To be eligible for repayment from RIP, the debtor must be earning less than twice the federal poverty level (about $25,000 a year for an individual), have debts that are 5% or more of their annual income and have more debt than assets.
Because hospitals and doctors are eager to get those hard-to-collect debts off their books, they sell them cheap.
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