Roughly 67,000 Milwaukee County residents could soon receive a letter in the mail informing them all their crippling medical debts have been wiped away.
A new partnership between Milwaukee County and New York-based national nonprofit RIP Medical Debt could cover the costs of $153 million in medical debt, if county officials approve designating $1.6 million in federal ARPA funds.
“I know that the Milwaukee County’s budget is what it is. We are always kind of on the razor’s edge,” said Milwaukee County Supervisor Shawn Rolland, who authored the resolution. “So, we really have to lean into high-impact, strategic proposals that can move the needle.”
“As ARPA Task Force co-chair, I sifted through a lot of the proposals that we’ve seen, and this to me checks all the boxes, and the scale of positive change that this can create is something that I have not seen replicated across other ideas,” he said.
Milwaukee County has about $15.6 million in undesignated ARPA funds, the federal pandemic assistance that allocated a total of $183.6 million to Milwaukee County under the American Rescue Plan Act, according to a county online dashboard.
Milwaukee County’s ARPA Task Force will take up the resolution on Thursday. If approved it would go to the full County Board.
RIP Medical Debt — with donations from like of comedian John Oliver and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — buys eligible patients’ medical debts from hospitals, health systems and debt collection agencies and then pays off any overdue bills, eliminating any long-delinquent debt.
A $10 donation can buy and eliminate $1,000 in debt, according to RIP Medical Debt.
To be eligible, residents must have a household income up to 400% of the federal poverty level — or roughly $111,000 for a family of four, and $54,360 for a family of one — and have medical debts totaling at least 5% of the individuals’ household income.
“We see this as as a win-win-win situation,” David Eager, an ambassador for RIP Medical Debt and former CFO for Aurora Health Care, told the Journal Sentinel.
Since its inception in 2014, RIP Medical Debt has canceled about $8.52 billion dollars of medical debt for more than 5.5 million families, according to their website.
In 2022, Toledo and Lucas County in Ohio, Cook County in Illinois, and New Orleans all successfully launched programs in partnership with RIP Medical Debt.
“We get all the accounts, no matter what the diagnosis,” said Keith Hearle, an advisor to the nonprofit, whose expertise is in hospital community benefits. “The patients end up getting a letter from RIP Medical Debt that says we have acquired this particular medical debt that was owed to this particular hospital. You should consider this medical debt to be paid in full. You no longer owe the balance.”
Hearle urges residents to keep a copy of their letter as proof of the debts being paid off.
In the days leading up to the public reveal of the resolution, the proposal gained support from Milwaukee County Board Supervisors Felesia A. Martin, Juan Miguel Martinez, Ryan Clancy and Liz Sumner.
Wauwatosa’s District 1 Ald. Andrew Meindl praised the funding saying it could help out about 2,000 of the city’s residents.
“At a time when we are all trying to navigate a changing global pandemic landscape, helping our most vulnerable residents facing financial hardship address their medical debt is an idea that can have a substantial impact on the lives of Milwaukee County residents,” County Executive David Crowley wrote in a statement to the Journal Sentinel.
For Milwaukee County’s chief health policy advisor Dr. Ben Weston, it speaks to a much broader issue of inequity at the local level.
“Medical debt does not stand in isolation. It leads to other types of debt as well. Credit card debt, bank loans, friends and family debt and loans to others,” he said. “Medical debt exacerbates systemic inequalities that exist in society.”
Despite the financial scope of the potential partnership with RIP Medical Debt, it serves as a short-term solution for the county.
“This is a one time fix so it doesn’t address the root causes of medical debts. This is a band aid to a fractured healthcare system,” Weston said. “Getting out of that hole introduces opportunity to move forward, but, of course, car crashes will continue. Heart attacks will continue. All these issues that build medical debt will continue and so medical debt will reaccumulate.”
Weston hopes for more long-term discussions about how to prevent residents from falling into debt, including educating about insurance, creating community safety nets, and finding ways to get residents and undocumented individuals specialty care.
Source link
