NYC plans to wipe out $2B in medical debt for 500k residents | Hacker News Reader

NYC plans to wipe out $2B in medical debt for 500k residents

apnews.com

27 pointsgeox15 comments

$18m over 3 years to help 500k people suffering from serious financial hardship? Thats not even $40 per person. Yeah, seems like an easy win.

>The city is working with RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit that buys medical debt in bulk from hospitals and debt collectors for pennies on the dollar.

I read it as $18m invested = $2b of debt for 500k people, as they seem to get a discount for buying the debt in bulk. Could always be more though :)

$18m is just under $0.01 on the dollar, which sounds very good value, but apparently debt collectors pay as little as $0.04 to $0.14 on the dollar anyway due to the low chance of getting paid:

https://www.solosuit.com/posts/how-much-collection-agencies-...

Election year. Just take it with a grain of salt. What is reported and what actually happens is alway very different. Plus it is democrats controlled, money generally assumed by them to grow on trees or rain from sky.

Well, kind of.. aren’t dollar bills mainly cotton?

Also under democrat presidents the average gdp growth as percentage looking at 1933-2020 is about double that of republicans ;)

OK, so "grows on bushes", then.

If the debt has already gone to collections, isn’t the person already screwed though? It’s documented in their credit reports whether or not it’s paid off. Damage has already been done.

Bye bye any chances of buying a home. Increased rates for various insurance products. Most apartments tend to demand high security deposits from ppl with bad credit. financing a car will likely result in subprime auto loan products.

Have heard some cases where it can be taken off completely though.

Satisfied medical debt is no longer counted for consumer credit scores effective July 2022.

Officially no. Unofficially my relatives in the loan industry still use that. American laws especially finance are not strictly enforced unless political, or terrorists-related. After election it will be overturned likely.

https://www.equifax.com/newsroom/all-news/-/story/first-chan...

>Effective July 1, 2022, all medical collection debt that has been paid by the consumer in full will no longer be included on U.S. consumer credit reports.

Where exactly are your "relatives in the loan industry" getting the data if not from the credit reporting agencies?

I'm sure many people will take screwed over double screwed. It sounds like they are targeting people who are in extreme financial hardship. Working your way out of that is one thing after another, so one thing less to worry about is always good.

That depends, I think, entirely on the debt collector being sold to.

I've had medical debt sold to debt collectors that was there for years as I went through back and forth figuring out whether it was valid, and it never showed up on my credit report, nor did various others where a couple of medical providers I used for a while had a bad habit of selling my bills to them before my insurance paid them in full for it.

[Dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113017

Forgiving debt - must be close to election time?

Not for mayor of New York, no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com