In October 2021, Natasha Pempsell, a preschool teacher and mother of four living in Covington, Georgia, received her letter: “RIP Medical Debt? It looks like a scam!
It seemed too good to be true: the $1,500 medical debt for her son Michael’s ER visit, since 2011, was suddenly erased.
It wasn’t a scam. “He said ‘abolished’. Ok, I know what that means!” said Pempsell. “And then I kept picking up the letter and reading it, over and over. Like, it’s amazing!”
How amazing? Since 2014, RIP medical debt cut more than $8.5 billion in medical bills for 5.4 million Americans.
How He Came to Be is the story of a huge change of heart that began in, of all places, New York’s Zuccotti Park during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. “I have never felt so much energy in my life,” recalls Jerry Ashton. He and a friend, both executives in the debt collection industry, ran into the protesters. The experience changed their lives.
Ashton said: “When they found out there were debt collectors on Occupy Wall Street, they came up to me and Craig Antico and said, ‘Could you help us get into the market for debt and to buy that debt, so we can forgive it and advertise it?”
In 2014, Ashton and Antico spun the concept into RIP Medical Debt, a charity that buys back overdue medical debt at pennies on the dollar, just like debt collectors do — meaning even small donations to the charity have a significant impact.
“We take $1 and turn it into at least $100 in medical debt relief by acting as a for-profit debt buyer,” said Allison Sesso, President and CEO of RIP Medical Debt. “Once we get our hands on these debts, we identify the people who are 400% poor [or below]or if their debt is 5% or more of someone’s income.”
Natasha Pempsell’s $1,500 debt happens to be about the average amount that RIP Medical Debt relieves. Sesso said, “You’d be surprised; it’s often not large sums of money that people struggle with. Sometimes the debts we relieve are $500, $1,000, $2,000.”
According to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of public health at Hunter College in New York who has studied medical debt, one in five American households has medical debt.
Teichner asked him, “How big is medical debt in bankruptcies in this country?”
“Medical illnesses and medical bills contribute to the majority of all bankruptcies in the United States,” Woolhandler replied.
And how much medical debt is there? Between $80 billion and $120 billion, compared to the $8.5 billion in medical debt that RIP wrote off.
Ashton said: “RIP is not the solution. RIP is a charity sweeping after the parade. The healthcare system is producing more people with unpayable debt than we can even handle.”
Natasha Pempsell said: “It’s disheartening when you’re working and you’re contributing to society and you’re paying your taxes and you’re a law-abiding citizen, and then if something happens to you or your kids, it’s is overwhelming.”
For Pempsell, however, what RIP Medical Debt has been able to accomplish is something of a miracle: “It makes anyone doubt, ‘Is there anything good in the world yet?’ It gives you hope that there is East well somewhere.”
For more information:
Story produced by Alan Golds. Publisher: Ed Givnish.
See also: