Bye-bye, Medical Debt
In March 2019, when Sara Cook first got a letter in the mail telling her that someone had paid off a chunk of her medical debt, she thought it was fake. “It seemed like one of those e-mails you get that says you have a long-lost uncle and you just inherited two million dollars,” Cook says. Cautiously, she called the number listed on the letter. What she learned was that this was not a scam or even a joke. It was 100 percent real.
A remarkable nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt had indeed paid $5,000 toward her bills. The organization didn’t take care of all the debt she’d amassed from several back surgeries, but the former nurse was still awed by the gesture. “I felt really loved and blessed,” she says, “knowing that complete strangers just did that out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton do have good hearts. They’re also former collection agents who have seen how runaway health-related debt has destroyed lives. “As a collector, you don’t think about forgiving the debt. You collect the debt,” Antico says. “I never
thought about all the hardship of the people who couldn’t pay. Now I’m trying to find the people who need help.”
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a quarter of all adults say they or a household member have had difficulty paying medical bills in the past year—and many of them have health insurance. In the United States, if you don’t pay a hospital bill, it will eventually go to a collection agency, which buys the debt at a discount but owns the right to collect the full amount—and we know how unpleasant that process can be.
RIP Medical Debt buys debt directly from collection agencies at a steep discount, usually paying only a few pennies to retire each dollar of debt. Since 2014, the men estimate they’ve spent only about $20 million to pay off nearly $1 billion in personal debts. Antico and Ashton get their money from individuals and charities that support RIP’S mission. The $5,000 to pay off Sara Cook’s bill was donated by a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Antico says that in 2019, the Christian Assembly Church in Southern California raised $53,000, which was enough to pay off more than $5 million in debt owed by thousands of people.
Don’t bother contacting RIP for help, however. Antico says they used to let people reach out to them, but it was a disheartening experience because they weren’t able to help everyone who applied. Instead, RIP researches potential recipients based on three criteria. First, they look for people who make no more than two and a half times the amount established as the federal poverty level. Then they screen for those whose debt (medical alone or combined with other debt) is equal to 5 percent or more of their gross income. Third, they look to see whether a person is insolvent.
For the people who do qualify, RIP’S help is life-altering. “After their letter, I realized that my life really doesn’t stink,” says Cook, who shares her story with anyone who will listen. “I may never be able to work as a nurse again, but I can sit at the school library and help kids read or serve up food in the soup kitchen. When people do something out of the kindness of their hearts, sometimes they may wonder, Does it really make a difference? I want people to know that this had a positive impact.”