Drowning in medical debt

The Rev. Robin Blundon knows medical bills.

Her daughter was born with a cleft lip and a cleft palate, and 8 surgeries over the last 15 years have been challenging, she said. One recent procedure ran $51,000. Another came in at $42,000. The Rev. Blundon got that particular bill after an insurance company had pre-approved it. It came on a Saturday, and she had to give a sermon that Sunday while she tried to figure out what to do. After a few days of conversations with doctors’ offices, the coding error was corrected.

The other bills? All real and all due.

Blundon, a hospice chaplain and acting pastor at Northford Congregational Church UCC, has sometimes taken on extra work to stay ahead of bills. She says that work-related insurance and the Affordable Care Act, which covers pre-existing conditions, have made all the difference.

She is not alone in this. “This affects so many families,” Blundon said, “and it's not just the money, but time and energy of the families who are working to meet these bills.”

In the Sturm und Drang of our post-election theater, life — and the pandemic — march on. As the state’s positivity rate and hospitalizations for the coronavirus rise, so, too, will Connecticut’s medical debt.

But there are occasional bright spots in the gloom. The conference to which Blundon’s church belongs — Southern New England Conference UCC — recently retired $26.2 million in medical debt in their conference states, as well as New England, and the debt for firstresponders around the country. This is the result of an effort that sprang from months’ long church discussions about social justice initiatives. The UCC worked with RIP Medical Debt, a New York-based non-profit founded by two former debt collectors that since 2014, has bought nearly $2 billion in medical debt for nearly 2 million people. (The national program got a big boost from Jon Oliver in 2016 in a segment on his parody news show “Last Week Tonight.”)

“We wanted to find a justice initiative from the start that demonstrated our commitment to live the love and justice of Jesus,” said the Rev. Kent Siladi, national UCC philanthropy director.

According to a February survey, nearly a third of all Americans have some kind of medical debt casting a pall. More than half of those people default on their bills. How much more has debt arisen since the pandemic — with subsequent layoffs and cutbacks that has sent the state’s unemployment rate to 7.5 percent, with some cities, such as Bridgeport and Hartford, hovering in the 12-13 percent range. One report said the national medical debt hovers at $45 billion, with a b.

A September Gallup poll said that half of Americans surveyed worry about bankruptcy after a major medical event — such as, say, contracting COVID-19. That figure is up from 45 percent last year.

The same survey shows fear of bankruptcy is at 64 percent among people of color. That makes sense, given the pandemic’s outsized impact on communities of color.

Here’s how RIP Medical Debt works: A person goes in for an operation. Insurance covers all but $20,000 of the bill, which the patient does not have. The debt sits accumulating interest, and begins affecting the patient’s credit score. Then in steps RIP, which buys the debt for pennies on the dollar, and then notifies the patient and credit reporting agencies that the debt is retired.

The UCC signed on and expected the push to end by Easter, but then the pandemic hit. Siladi said there was brief talk of hitting the pause button — how do you raise money during a pandemic when people are losing their jobs and don’t have discretionary funds to donate? — but the UCC decided to continue, Siladi said.

Roughly two weeks ago, lucky recipients — unknown to church officials or members — received letters that let them know their medical debt was gone, just like that. The letter said, in part, that even though the recipient might never go through the doors of a UCC church, the recipient is loved, and their debt is forgiven. Siladi likes to imagine what opening that envelope was like for people who, like a miracle, suddenly found they were no longer saddled with crushing debt.

So far, Blundon's family has been able to stay ahead of the bills, but it’s meant having to make careful choices in order to pay medical bills, like waiting to buy a house, and choosing quieter vacations. It has also meant using vacation time to go to doctor appointments and to be available during recoveries.

Yet for all of that, Blundon has seen friends, family and patients’ families who have even bigger bills and medical challenges. She doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to have medical debt miraculously retired. It’s like a dream, “like there is hope to overcome the debt, like you can actually breathe for a change, instead of spending hours trying to figure out how to pay the latest bill,” she said.