This organization is erasing medical debt by the millions

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The weight of medical debt can be crushing, but Undue Medical Debt is helping relieve some people of that burden.

The nonprofit raises funds to buy and forgive medical debt, which CEO Allison Sesso says affects 1 in 4 Americans.

“It is the kind of thing that you can't avoid,” she said. “The number one indicator of whether or not you end up in medical debt is not your insurance status, it's whether or not you get sick.”

“It actually is a determinant of your health, because the medical debt creates all of these other anxieties, and it undermines your ability to sleep well … it makes you buy less healthy food because you have less money, like there's all these things that undermine your well-being when you have medical debt.”

Sesso explained there’s a secondary market where debt collectors buy debt from hospitals for a fraction of what’s owed.

“One dollar can get rid of one hundred dollars of medical debt,” she said, "because the people who owe the debt don't have the means to pay … but if some debt buyer comes along and says … ‘I'll give you a million dollars for that 100 million dollar portfolio,’ that's a million dollars you didn't have before.”

Usually, the buyer then tries to collect enough of the debt to turn a profit, making deals with the people who owe. Undue Medical Debt uses the same process to buy debt and simply doesn’t collect.

“We take donated dollars, and then apply those to the purchase of a large debt portfolio,” Sesso said, “and then we send letters to people telling them that we've relieved them of that debt and that they will never ever owe that debt again.”

Last summer, local organizers Claire Hirschberg and Lou Garner launched a fundraising campaign with Undue Medical Debt specifically for the Philadelphia region.

“It is so easy just to set it up,” Garner said. “You don't have to do any of the purchasing, you don't have to do any of the math, you just have to get them to make your little website.”

Garner is a nurse, and they’ve seen patients stressing about debt when undergoing a life-saving procedure.

“[One patient] told me that she had Googled, like, ‘What happens if I die?’” Garner said. “She's contemplating like, okay, I die. What happens to my family? What happens to my kids? But also, are they going to get slammed with millions of dollars of debt on top of losing me?”

So when Hirschberg sent Garner a video of a church group that ran a campaign through Undue Medical Debt and celebrated with a debt-burning ceremony, asking, “What if we did, like, the gutter-pagan version of this?” Garner immediately said yes.

They gathered their friends and raised more than $17,000, which bought more than $2 million of medical debt. Then they printed out a giant, fake medical bill and burned it in a bonfire on the Walmart pier.

“Our thing at the party was getting everyone to chant ‘Debt is hell, let it burn,’” Hirschberg described, “which is really fun to do when you're lighting stuff on fire and setting off fireworks.”

Garner and Hirschberg are especially proud of doing this with a group of mostly queer people.

“There's a lot of attacks on queer and trans people right now,” Hirschberg said, “and we actually have this incredible, fantastic group of people … who care about each other; we care about our communities … I want people who are impacted by this to know that, you know, we care about them. And we're like, a bunch of, like, dirtbag queers. And I think that's pretty cool.”

“I think lately, we're all kind of learning that all we have is each other,” Garner added. “Which is why doing stuff like this feels extremely affirming, in a time where we kind of feel like everything's falling apart.”

Undue Medical Debt welcomes new campaigns and individual donations on its website .

🎧 Hear more about the impact of medical debt and this debt-burning party in the player below: