After wiping out $6.7 billion in medical debt, this nonprofit is just getting started

Soon after giving birth to a daughter two months premature, Terri Logan received a bill from the hospital. She recoiled from the string of numbers separated by commas.

Then a few months ago — nearly 13 years after her daughter’s birth and many anxiety attacks later — Logan received some bright yellow envelopes in the mail. They were from a nonprofit group telling her it had bought and then forgiven all those past medical bills.

This time, it was a very different kind of surprise: “Wait, what? Who does that?”

RIP Medical Debt does. The nonprofit has boomed during the covid-19 pandemic, freeing patients of medical debt, thousands of people at a time. 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.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/health/2022/08/20/after-wiping-out-67-billion/