John Oliver buys $15M in debt and forgives all of it on 'Last Week Tonight'
youtube.com
youtube.com
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/03/john-oliv...
Sam Bee's full frontal and Oliver's Last Week Tonight are now both my staples of american news consumption.
He wasn't nearly as judgmental in The Bugle, while being as funny as ever. [1] [2]
However, I'd be interested to learn which shows you'd say are more balanced, but still take on political or maybe controversial topics.
- debt collection
- voter identification and voter fraud
- abortion clinic laws
- trump
And he doesn't ever state things as "fact" when it is speculation. He only specifies facts when they are facts. And he never tries to push opinions into sort-of-kind-of factual sounding things like most news sites.
How would you talk about a topic where voters are being forced to show identification in such a way as to exclude most minority voters and even have people state on camera that is the goal? These are blatant abuses of power that should be heavily exposed.
This is why I have respect and don't feel he's too preachy.
There's absolutely no reason someone has to adhere to some arbitrary ratio of comedy to seriousness (edit: or preachiness, etc).
We're talking about comedy v. preaching to the audience, not when to make a joke and when to make a serious point. They're completely different discussions.
And to the Stewart point, he was perfectly able to explain (using comedy) why he believed something without implying that you are lesser for disagreeing with it. Oliver seems to be able to do that at most 1/3 as much as Stewart. The remaining 2/3 is "not only am I right for believing this, and not only are you wrong and you should feel bad about yourself if you don't, but you're so wrong that I can't even comprehend how you could possibly disagree."
Not completely. If there was a subculture that he didn't get along with, he'd feel completely at home with completely steam rolling them. (I.e. Dungeons and Dragons) What I liked about Colbert is that he would try to jump into the culture and make absurd jokes with the community.
So the ratio for the full show is less 50/50 and more 25/75, which is much closer to your sweet spot.
I think he (Oliver) is funny but I prefer the Colbert and Southpark satirical model as well. For some reason satire just seems less "preachy" even though it can be just as much so.
I find John's commentaries to be suitably supported by substance, with constructive conclusions.
I worry that characterization as "left" is a defence against cognitive acknowledgements that just happen to be dissonant with neurostatic precepts.
My problem with him is his facts, but his interpretation of them.
The main problem in Venezuela is the erosion of property rights. Nowhere in the report was this mentioned.
1. Chavez was elected in 1999 and utilized the OPEC cartel to decrease production and drive up the price. Utilizing the high prices, he gave away every socialist program that his increased oil prices could deliver.
2. When the socialist programs had to have more cash, Chavez muscled in on the oil producers and told them to find more revenue or else they would nationalize the oil rigs. Companies said there was no money unless operation and maintenance costs were foregone, and they would not undersign that so Chavez nationalized them (property right strike across the bow). This was done through the enabling law which ultimately what started the erosion of the rights.
3. As companies saw that profits could not be returned, they started to get the heck out of Dodge. Tariffs and other crazy price increasing measures were instituted until prices became very high. The government did the next property right erosion by controlling prices on goods. Black market took over to provide goods at real rates because the governments rates could not be met.
4. Any industry that was making a profit was derided in public speeches.
5. Foreign investors avoided investing in the housing market as they saw newly built properties nationalized. The government did not even pay the investors a compensatory fee!
The oil is price is an aside contributor, but when you do not respect property rights, say goodbye to anyone wanting to invest in you.
I'm trying to decide if his omission is okay or not.
Conservative (and I intend that as a swearword) hit-media present his lack of condemnation of "socialism" as a wrongdoing. Which certainly can be argued, that since he got airtime, he has some responsibility to educate, especially if he choose to talk about the topic.
However, I don't think he is a politology scholar, so not using a word so misued as socialism is probably a smart thing on his part, and sticking to the criticism of the consequences of the policies themselves is also an okay-ish solution.
I think shows what a dictatorship leads to is more important than condemning whatever ideology you think lead to it. After all, autorism always mutates the ideology it uses to justify itself, usually subverting all of the original ideas related to it in about 5 minutes after gaining power.
The socialist / communist people who elected him created the monster that he became, so those who wanted the platform elected and in his mind instilled his beliefs as "the will of the people" that we hear so much from those who are marginally elected.
No one ever wants to elect a dictator, however, the requirements of a socialist / communist leader lends itself much more to developing one when one utters: "It is the will of the people" to supersede the property rights of others.
The problem is, when someone has so much power to do this, ideologies don't matter anymore, and there's no argument that can best the "will of the people", because if the will of the people is wrong, then the people are wrong too, and since they are the majority, you're screwed with your logic (and rationality).
I'm saying these, because it's important to note that communism as an abstract idea is not worse or better than any other form of government, such as feudalism, or fascism. Ideally all could work. Given an ample supply of good kings, incorruptible premier secretaries and supreme leaders, and so on.
Naturally, the problems are foreseeable, so individual power should be limited. What better way to do that than to remove even the power of wealth generation? Bam! Instant communism, again.
And this works with property rights too. Someone offers you a very good deal on a crate of gold, you buy it. It turns out it was stolen from a national bank. But reversing that transaction would violate your property rights. (How far you would have to go to make sure you're not buying contraband/bootlegged stuff? Anyone can make up an example where you have done enough yet a lot of people will suffer as a result of your gains.)
Even the parts where Olliver makes fun of Trump, for example the epic sagas about his hands or how he impersonated his own press secretary, are very clear signs whom I don't want to see in possession of nuclear launch codes. Or drones for that matter.
Thats not how the US system works.
And I am not saying that everything he says is always like that. It's just too much for my taste.
The US system is not that fragile. It's made to be able to deal with presidents smart or dumb.
I see no evidence that Trump should be any more dangerous than Bush or Clinton. He might say more outrageous things than even Bush to the international community but his rhetorics isn's his politics and he can't just send nuclear bombs at whomever he wants.
I also don't see why anyone would want a thin-skinned man child in charge of the only superpower in the world. Being in the center of at least one pretty strong fraud case doesn't help either. The argument "he just says stupid things all the time, but he will be presidential and wise when he is president" doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
The president will need permission to declare war.
Trump can in theory command the nukes to be fired without declaring war but this only works if there isn't any political opposition agains his case (i.e. it would be considered unpatriotic to disagree with his decision)
Given the general dislike for Trump there will be plenty of dissent if he decided to just send nuclear bombs left and right. The military would overthrow him pretty quickly.
So yes there are checks and balances and in the case of Trump they would make sure that he followed protocol.
You dislike him so your analysis of why he would be thin skinned has little value here too.
I have no personal interest in this as I can't vote, however I am not afraid of him more than Hillary (who is a known Hawk)
Trump's thin skin is a proven fact. He still isn't over the jokes over his small hands. He felt the need to defend his penis size in a presidential campaign. He attacks voters at his own events. He verbally insulted almost all minority groups. His default reaction to any criticism is to personally insult the critic.
No.
I've been on the opposite side of some of his rants. You do not get the best counter-arguments. It's just another media spin show where you get the weakest arguments, pre-digested and cued up with the best media management possible for you to laugh at them.
He can do a decent job of substantiating his points, but you are not getting anything like the whole story, and if you think you are, you're hardcore in a small filter bubble.
(And if you're about to start trying to explain to me that yes he does give the best counterarguments, you're pathologically in a small filter bubble. At the very least, I know better counterarguments than the one he prompts you to laugh at. And come on, pre-biasing you to laugh at the opposition may be fun but it's hardly the path to intellectual enlightenment.)
That said, I must give props to putting money where his mouth is in this case.
I stopped watching after several episodes in a row felt exceptionally biased and unfair. Alas I did not write down the topics so I've always had trouble describing to people why I don't like John Oliver.
And before you say "Well, yeah, the other side does that, but thank goodness my side doesn't do that", I would challenge you that as you read your next couple of political articles, click, pull them up, maybe zoom your browser until the entire article fits on the screen, then just sort of defocus your eyes for a moment and just look at the pattern of text and quotes on the screen. Do you already have a pretty good idea what the paragraphs are? Do they fit the description I just gave you? I won't claim to read a completely balanced media diet, I have opinions too, but I do at least sample a lot of things, and this pattern is universally used.
It's a cognitively-hazardous way to consume arguments even before we discuss its addictiveness. Putting it in video form is probably even worse.
Just because data supports global warming doesn't mean everyone agrees how to solve it or likes being berated and shamed because don't drive an electric car or ride a bike to work. Not everyone agrees we should shut off the US economy to slow down global warming. This is where partisan politics gets messy and people start merging their facts and their opinions.
But that's just it--large swaths of people think it's some higher order conspiracy. That it is all just made up.
> or likes being berated and shamed because don't drive an electric car or ride a bike to work. Not everyone agrees we should shut off the US economy to slow down global warming. This is where partisan politics gets messy and people start merging their facts and their opinions.
No serious group is doing that. But people are trying to ring the alarm bells that we will either have serious economic problems now, or severe ones later. There is no "keep doing nothing" and we'll be fine option.
Google is indeed unhelpful; I had never Googled "neurostatic", and it's possible I have the term wrong. That said, I seem to recall reading it somewhere.
Interestingly, the lead-in for Neuroplasticity on Wikipedia[1] states:
> [Neuroplastic] contrasts with the previous scientific consensus that the brain develops during a critical period in early childhood, then remains relatively unchangeable (or "static") afterward.
So I feel cautiously confident that I did read it, quite possibly in old medical textbooks that are not online.
I used "precepts" just because it felt like it conveyed the right concept in context.
I hope that helps.
Well, those on the left would think so. Oddly enough, those on the right think that facts, evidence & observation are derided as 'right.' Weird how that happens, isn't it? It's almost as though we all sincerely believe that we are correct and that those who disagree with us are incorrect.
When 99/100 scientists agree that climate change is a thing and random politicians, business leaders and religious leaders are the dissenters; fact is very clearly on one side and bias the other.
The guy creates and hosts a weekly political comedy show, researches topics, has a network spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on those topics, and you think it's a fair comparison to someone whose activism extends to "clicking the Like button on facebook".
And you're the one calling his attitude "holier than thou".
Let's say I win some lottery and I MAKE $100k. I decide to SPEND $90k of that by giving it to charity. My gesture doesn't count because I'm still in the net positive by your logic.
Yes, he runs a profitable show. Nobody said he's a career humanitarian. But you said, quoting, "he has just become a left wing slacktivist". Slacktivism is a term that pokes fun at people clicking Like on facebook and signing worthless petitions then feeling like they made a real difference.
That you equate him to that is insulting and offensive to just about everybody.
Seriously, what the hell?
His show is on HBO, not Comedy Central.
No one's going to tell Oliver that the bums lost...
John Oliver was on UK television a lot before moving to the US. He was doing the same sort of material back then - left-leaning, political, and insightful. He isn't pandering. He (and his team) is broadcasting what he actually believes.
By critiquing a system that he knows nothing about makes the criticism ring hollow.
Do you ever wonder why somebody would extend you a 30 day unsecured 0% interest loan (credit card)? Or a 15-25% interest unsecured rolling loan to someone with little or no credit history? You can choose to make policies that make it harder for creditors, but you can't pretend that won't impact the borrowing rate or the access of credit to many Americans. The idea that you can't buy and sell receivables seems silly.
I agree that some of the reasons people collect debt is unfortunate and unjust. But people need to be responsible and we need reasonable laws that prevent harassment.
In many cases, creditors should be more picky about whom they lend money too. Especially if they can't afford ethical collection the question becomes: Should this company even be giving credit?
If you consider the constraint that Last Week Tonight is primarily a comedy show themed around important newsworthy issues rather than an investigative journalism show it's hard to imagine it done any better.
He and Jon Stewart keep (kept in the case of Jon) using this excuse when they get things wrong, but when they get things right they take all the glory they can get. The show(s) have to have some sort of accountability.
For example Couric was just ripped for adding 6 seconds of dead air on a documentary....but that's literally what The Daily Show had been doing for years, making people look like idiots (so it fits their segment narrative). That's all good fun until you realize young people think people like Stewart and Oliver are trustworthy news sources.
I like what they do in many cases, but I despise this excuse that it's "just" a comedy show. Maybe NBC nightly news should just add an in-studio audience that laughs and suddenly they can get away with every screw up.
That's exactly what it is. It's the equivalent of those people on YouTube who assault someone and then say 'it was just a prank!'
I think making fun of someone and trashing their reputation without being super careful to check all the facts first is really nasty and I don't like watching either of their shows.
Edit: I have heard Stewart say "we're not the news" in response to questions like "Do you feel a responsibility to cover every important issue?" where "we're not the news" means they only cover issues they can make funny (an example of something perhaps too sad to make funny is the Flint water crisis)
That doesn't mean I agree with the person they are interviewing, or that that person isn't ignorant...but there is no way you can see their reporting as objective.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-23/don-t-eve...
Jason Jones talks to two hunters, a non-fatal hunter and a fatal hunter, to see what method is better. (4:33)
It's not meant to be an excuse, it's meant to be an accusation. If a comedy show is so much better at news than a news show, that's a major failing on the part of actual news shows.
Should we hold these types of shows to a talk show standard or a news standard?
When CBS presented a fabricated military report about George W., they were rightly condemned for presenting false information and presenting it as fact. If, instead, the fabricated document had been shown on John Oliver, would we think it's OK simply because John Oliver is partly comedy?
As with The Daily Show, The Nightly Show, and the (former) Colbert Report, among others, the format is a variation of the format of a mixed news/commentary show of the type that is the staple of the cable news networks, and they all use that format because they are parodies of that kind of show.
If he's not going to actually consider the facts, why make jokes about current affairs rather than just totally making things up?
I think that's putting it mildly. A major issue with using Excel files for data transfer is, to put it bluntly, the lackadaisical way people treat Excel files. They are passed around and edited. Passed back once edited. Passing them around creates copies of them. They get goofy names as people try to manage the multiple editors and editions. There's no verifiable authority for the source or latest version of the data. None of the data or its state is externally verifiable. We've all seen where this goes south very quickly; we even have a meme for it: the FINAL FINAL FINAL suffix that gets appended to the filename. I suspect this is why/how zombie debt, as described by Oliver, gets resurrected: data quality issues: debt that is accidentally (or on purpose, to make another/recover a quick buck) sold again when it shouldn't have been. And the original owner of the debt, once sold, isn't interested in keeping track of it (they've already written it off). Some of the issue is that there are multiple parties involved. Real estate has title records as one way to solve this, which isn't necessarily a final solution (thus the existence of title insurance), but without even something resembling a centralized and agreed upon record of the history of the debt changing hands, it's impossible to reliably know anything about it. Excel files exacerbate that.
Further down in these comments, AstroJetson says that to forgive debt, they "they just delete the Excel file it's in". I find this to be a reasonable possibility for how this is handled. But deleting a file received from some other party doesn't make the file disappear. It's perhaps still in an attachment somewhere, in the sent mail folder, on the computer of the sender (perhaps moved to a "Sold Debt" folder).
None of this is necessarily solved by transfer methods like EDI or HL7, except for what amounts to a barrier to entry to access the data and make it available to begin with. EDI is a solution for purchase orders between Walmart and suppliers is because 1) there's often a limited number of parties (two) involved with the data, 2) Walmart is always one of the parties (so it is effectively centralized), 3) the data itself is verifiable against other, trusted sources like accounts payable and accounts receivable. It's also going into a system that has automation components. The people who are buying debt information and receiving it via Excel spreadsheets are just going to go over it by hand and call/contact people on it. It's going into some massive computer based process and generate reports for dozens of different departments like the data being transferred via EDI at Walmart is.
This is where someone mentions using a blockchain or git to track the way the debt changes hands and its current state. This would be a fine suggestion if it wasn't in the interest of the debt buyers/sellers to keep the system shitty with little visibility/oversight so they can take advantage of debtors and other debt buyers any way they can.
I didn't ask if they tracked all of it in an Excel file ;-)
If someone sold my debt (which is already stinky because after that I have relationship with a party I never entered any relationship with) I'd hope that what's being sold is bit more than my name with "iou" and some numbers. If not original agreement, then at least a statement from notary that had seen my credit agreement and someone who attests at some high penalty that it was not paid yet.
In his latest clip, he mocks information being passed by Excel.
Also, I find it incredibly irresponsible how the customers information is handled. They quite literally email spreadsheets around with thousands of names, addresses and SIN numbers. If someone nefarious got their hands on just one of the many thousands of those documents floating around, it's a great starting place for identity theft.
> No contracts, no history, no anything, just, this person now owe's you $X.
Going through the details isn't worth it to the buyers since its for such a small amount. They give them names, numbers and amounts to their phone bank and they see what they can get.
Killing off the secondary market would decrease the amount and cost of accessible credit to borrowers with bad or no credit history. It may or may not be right, but there is definitely a trade-off.
Going through the details isn't worth it to the buyers since its for such a small amount.
Lets pretend you have a false debt on one of these lists. It shows up on your credit report. You try to get a mortgage, but can't until this debt is settled. So now you either have to essentially pay their ransom to have it closed quickly, or proceed through length processes to have it forgiven if they don't have the appropriate documentation to prove it. Neither situation is ideal, and only exists because "going through the details isn't worth it".
Maybe credit is too cheap if we have to follow shoddy practices to afford it. Maybe credit shouldn't be accessible in such large quantities to the masses as it is today. Either way, it's probably too late to change that now.
That's what's so great about the show. He can make boring stuff like net neutrality, patents and fashion funny.
of course, on HIS show he was talking about why that is a bad thing, and how this shadowy conspiracy organization was influencing democracy. All the children on reddit gobbled it up of course, despite never having had a business dispute themselves that was hampered by incompatible laws in states.
Sorry to disappoint you John Oliver, you're not a good comedian, you're just not funny enough. However you're extremely entertaining. Better start telling people that you're a journalist who uses comedy to get the attention of people into important subjects that they wouldn't otherwise pay attention to.
That's his point. He does this deliberately so as to bring important subject to the front that would otherwise be ignored by his audience. Case in point, look what he did with net neutrality. The government got the message on that one ("I am not a dingo").
Honestly, his rant about Harper brought out enough apathetic voters that I think he may have swayed the last Canadian election. No Canadian outlet had put together the clips to show exactly how nuts harper had become in recent years. Those who otherwise didn't care about the parties were rallied to at least send him packing. That sort of realworld impact is something over and above what Stewart ever accomplished with his more populous approach.
The show is really funny until you're on the wrong side of the one of their jokes. Or when they oversimplify something you know a lot about.
Preachy is the appropriate word. I really wish he (and his writers) would watch that. Somewhere in the rumor mills there is a story about John Stewart disagreeing with his writers because of how left and preachy they were as well.
In fairness, I've literally never seen an accurate media report about one of the topics I know far more deeply than the average technically educated person (a particular NASA project, a certain narrow specialization in physics, and a language/culture I have spoken/lived-in for much of my life).
Not even "oversimplified". They are literally always wrong or misleading.
What Oliver is doing is pretty thoughtful, well-researched argumentation, something completely missing from both of those dominant modes. And something that's between an essential part of civic discourse from Plato to quite recently...
The uploader has not made this
video available in your country
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=912968418832168&id...
That returns with:
Sorry, this page isn't available
The link you followed may be broken,
or the page may have been removed.
So there's a little bit of movement, I guess?
But besides that, it's a great idea that will entrench cable companies for a few more years and delay the transition to streaming by forcing streaming services to compete against every single cable and satellite operator in the EU at the same time (cable/sat firms aren't part of the digital single market, so they can keep carrying on). Is there content that is specifically relevant to Estonians, but for various reasons thorny to license in France? That's going to suck for the Estonians.
One might assume that Netflix (or another one of the streaming services) might grab the broadcast rights to a major sporting event (traditionally the domain of cable/satellite, and the last good reason to keep this around for many consumers) -- this proposal makes sure that day won't happen until they can grab the rights for the entire EU zone, which is obviously hugely expensive. It's not hard to imagine that it might make more sense (and be a lot easier) to grab the rights in a single, small-ish, well connected market (say Netherland) as a pilot, then leave, say, the UK for a few years later until broadband outside the cities get good enough to support at decent HD stream.
Major sporting events is of course only one such example. Plenty of content will suffer the same fate.
Another victim is license fee supported content. Especially the BBC relies on re-licensing high quality content in other european markets. This income subsidises the UK operation. If forced to not geoblock this content, the BBC will have to chose between foregoing significant licensing income, or to stop streaming altogether.
Here's a link that should work on main part of the show: https://youtu.be/Ii6TEJuvrM0
This guys looks to me like he's been in TV for a little too long and tries very hard to find a audience with very simple jokes (that feel kind of forced) amplified by background laughter.
He has the right idea and did the right thing but I personally would have found it more enjoyable without the jokes.
But without them, I think his show would fall flat with most of his audience, so I don't think he really has a choice about them at this point.
To me is perfect cause I like programming, music, politics and weed.
I always thought this was a dying genre but seems like young ppl are into it?
So really he saved them from harassing phone calls, not really the money itself.
As the program points out what they buy is name and number. So I suppose if the person involved showed up in court and demanded any sort of confirmation of debt (like original bills perhaps?) then the case would be dismissed. After all the company needs some proof. But they overload the courts and if no one shows up to defend then the default judgement goes in favor of the debt collector.
And then they go and collect with the power of law behind them.
This is crazy but that's how they roll in the land of the free :)
That's also why they were sold for a fraction of a penny on the dollar -- the only way you could collect on them is to call the debtors and hassle them. At this point those debtors are probably also wise to the fact that you have no legal power to enforce.
Pretty much they can hook you in by calling you and saying "Good day Mr. Smith you have a debt for 50$ to Acme Medical do you want to hear about our debt relief plan with payments as low as 1$ a month". If at any point you seem to show any response to it they can use it to prove that you've acknowledged the debt at which point they can go to court and force you to pay.
The laws should be made that way that debt that has expunged is not tradeable or actionable in any way period.
How long does it stay on your credit report?
Declaring bankruptcy generally lets you keep your primary house and car; without bankruptcy those could be taken from you.
> differentiating medical from non-medical collection agency accounts. This will help ensure that medical collections have a lower impact on the score, commensurate with the credit risk they represent. These enhancements help lenders because it leads to a more predictive score. The median FICO Score for consumers whose only major negative references are medical collections will increase by 25 points.
http://www.fico.com/en/newsroom/fico-score-9-introduces-refi...
http://time.com/money/3092005/fico-credit-score-changes-fair...
The debt is only valid six months from delinquency to seven years post that date. Period.
See paragraph c of https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1692c or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Debt_Collection_Practic...
IANAL.
I once (in the early 1990s) refused to pay a company I was very unhappy with -- IIRC it was Verizon. They cancelled my service, tried to collect, then sold the debt after a while.
I still get these offers to settle the debt for 70% less than the total -- but the letters always include a disclaimer somewhere to the effect of "due to the age of this debt, you will not be sued, and this will not be reported to any credit bureau".
My failure to pay stayed as a negative event ("serious delinquency") on my credit report with each of the major credit bureaus, for roughly 7 years, just like it is supposed to. Then it disappeared.
I believe that this is an offshoot of the Occupy movement.
EDIT: I'm not sure what their tactics are or whether I'd support them. I did like the jubilee approach.
> Until now, we have worked in the secondary debt market, using crowdfunded donations to buy portfolios of medical and educational debts for pennies on the dollar, just as debt collectors do. Only, instead of collecting on them, we abolish them, operating under the belief that people shouldn’t go into debt for getting sick or going to school. [.....] But this approach has its limits. Federal loans, for example, are guaranteed by the government, and debtors can be freed of them — via bankruptcy — only under exceedingly rare circumstances. That means they aren’t sold at steep discounts and remain out of our reach. What’s more, America’s mountain of student debt is too immense for the Jubilee to make a significant dent in it. Real change will require more organized actions like those taken by the Corinthian 15.
Its not surprising that they lost traction after the pivot. Buying discounted debt is a tactic which respects the logic of the market. Debt strikes go against the cultural norm of treating debt as a moral obligation.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/opinion/a-strike-against-s...
Here's an idea - aggregate debt at pennies on the dollar and sell it back to the debtor at twice the amount it'll still be pennies on the dollar and you'll make a nice profit.
That's essentially what a lot of debt collectors will accept. If you have debt in collection, sometimes you can offer them a lump sum instead of the whole amount and they'll take it because they're looking to simply profit.
At that point it's likely your credit is already ruined though... which is a whole different topic to broach.
In the UK at least getting passed to a debt collector should have no impact on your credit score. It's when they decide to go further and recoup it through court that you start to get hurt. This is my experience at least. It makes sense as I know many people who have been passed to debt collectors for debts they didn't owe so it would be a mess if that effected their credit.
The collections agency starts offering you to settle your debt at the highest possible amount and slowly negotiates down. For any amount above $0 they receive from you is a marginal benefit for them.
i.e. marginal benefit > marginal cost for any collection above $0 since buying their list of debtors is a sunk cost.
They might eventually be able to get it discharged, but it'd require them to declare bankruptcy.
I don't know: It might be too subtle to scare people with. The kinds of people who could easily understand this tactic in a one-page letter are probably not the kinds of people in debt.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1099c.pdf
The borrower also gets a copy, and the IRS will know to look for it when the borrower files his taxes.
"What? I don't owe any taxes! That was all a loan!"
As for the compensation idea, I'm assuming you mean from employment, I would have to hope that's already covered by the income tax laws where there are guidelines in what determines compensation from employment and what is considered employment. Many people have tried many schemes around that one. Besides, even if someone tried something like that it's quite a bit different than a debt owed to the hospital because they performed surgery on you.
But from what I'm reading from the links provided the government doesn't get involved until the owner of the debt files the form to involve them. Which seems odd in of itself to me. It's almost like a punishment placed on the party owing the debt from the owner of the debt through the powers of the state; which is odd since the owner has decided to not collect.
But then again, I'm not familiar with laws governing debt so I'm sure there's some elaborate nuance I'm not understanding.
If that were where it ended, we couldn't have income taxes :-P
But as for the broader point: if you don't tax forgiven loans, you're effectively allowing a vector for untaxed income -- whether personal or business.
I agree it gets a little trickier when the debt was for for a non-monetary good in the first place (e.g. surgical services), but many of the same concerns apply -- I may hide income by transacting it in the form of a service.
You're right that public policy purposes may disfavor that sort of thing (e.g. counting charity surgical services as taxable income), but this is common -- there was the time someone won a free trip to space but refused because he'd have to pay taxes on its market value.
The point of the episode is not John Oliver's Oprah stunt, but rather how the debt collection industry works.
[The original title is/was: "John Oliver buys $15M in debt and forgives all of it on 'Last Week Tonight'"]
The reason for that being, buying up bad paper raises the value of it, whereas letting people know their rights lowers the value of it. If bad paper was worth less, debt originators would have stronger incentives to work something out with their insolvent customers rather than sell to shady debt collectors.
debt!
I'd try and find some links but I'm currently on my phone.
Actually it's pretty simple. They figure out who needs the debt relief. They then go buy the debt for pennies on the dollar from one of the companies that has it. Then they forget about it. (I'd say they just delete the Excel file it's in, but there is lots of negative karma going on above this post about how wonderful Excel is)
From their website "Through sophisticated data analytics, RIP analyzes its medical debt portfolios to pinpoint those who are most in need of relief and then negotiates to purchase this debt for a significantly reduced amount – rates typically made available only to large organizations in the debt buying industry.
Once this debt is purchased – debtors are unburdened of this unpaid item."
So Oliver just gave them $14+ million in debt that he paid pennies on the dollar for and the are going to ignore it. Remember it's been written off (as a tax benefit) already, so it's only the debt people that care about it. Last guy that cared got paid by Oliver, so he's good to go.
I'm happy about the debt he forgave, though. An organization called Rolling Jubilee[2] does it without a tv show - you can buy someone's debt, too. I didn't notice a shout out; did I just miss it?
edit: learned from the comment above me that they've stopped doing it, and are now The Debt Collective[3], an advocacy organization.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bill...
That's comedy gold. Wish John used that line.
> I'm not sure what he was calling for, here. That companies be required to hold on to their own debt?
I think he's calling for regulation. At least some mechanisms to ensure that the debt is factual. Maybe some mechanisms that would ensure people can't collect the debt that they can't legally enforce. Maybe some mechanisms that would prevent accepting debt by default when someone doesn't show up to court. All these things lead to much abuse. Basically something that would address the problems he highlighted.
"Topic 431 - Canceled Debt – Is It Taxable or Not?" https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc431.html
"This is one of the most unbelievable articles I've ever read. If you didn't read it all the way through, do so over lunch or something; it's amazing."
The video mentioned several scenarios where debt that's seemingly past it collection date or expired is still desired by these collection companies.
Or is forgiving the debt officially the only way of forever getting rid of it without fear of it coming back from the dead.
Isn't the real reason that these debt-buying companies(and the evils that come with it) exist because of bad-lending and in this case, an overpriced, inefficient health-care system?
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=912968418832168&id...
"Sorry, this page isn't available The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed."
https://www.facebook.com/LastWeekTonight/videos/912968418832...
(Eg, raise money and use it to buy debt and do nothing with it)
I'd back it :-)
It looks like the ACA doesn't really do anything to change the picture for a $474,000 medical bill. The guy got charged $39 each for over 200 glucose checks. That's the price of a new meter for every check.
I don't obviously see the specific anecdote you're discussing in the thread, so I can't tell if what transpired is because it (somehow) didn't blow either of those thresholds, or because it wasn't an "essential" benefit, or simply pre-dated those terms of the ACA becoming effective.
[1] - http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-law/benefit-limits/i...
The example I used is the case presented in the video. I just googled for Bob Weinkauf.
http://writingshares.com/cnn-anderson-cooper-medical-news-vi...
I was also curious when this happened. Looks likely to be under the ACA unless it took years to hit the news though.
So I don't know. Maybe he went to the emergency room and it was out of network under his plan, leaving him to shoulder the costs. I didn't dig much after skimming for an approximate date.
The NHS has serious problems related to accountability, the typical problem with huge multi-level government bureaucracies. Honestly, the NHS has similar problems to the American public education system, for mostly the same reasons.
The ACA has the serious problem that it was explicitly sold as a way to contain costs both at an individual and aggregate level. That has pretty much been exposed as a lie.
The ACA has been good for the narrow band of people who were included in the expanded medicaid coverage, but it's not too hard to imagine a separate (and much simpler) bill that accomplished that part of the bill, without the massive rework of healthcare for the middle class.