Say RIP to Medical Debt

Dec 6

The votes are in for the Nov. poll for which organization will get a $50 donation from eclecticmisc.org!

Every month, site visitors participate in a poll to help me pick which progressive-friendly organization will get a $50 donation.

Here are some of the past winners that you’ve chosen, ranging from Jacobin to Planned Parenthood, and many in-between.

Of the six choices, top vote getter was:

RIP Medical Debt! (Twitter, Website)

They’re a great organization, with an impressive 100% rating on Charity Navigator, founded by two former collections executives, Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton. The aim of RIP Medical Debt is to raise donations so they can purchase medical debt — bundled together — and relieve that debt often for as little as 1 penny for every dollar.

This means that people who have thousands or millions of dollars of unpaid medical expenses are no longer in debt. Or the victim of harassment by collection agencies, who often use dubious or even illegal intimidation practices. Or having to deal with the financial and emotional burden of debt.

I first heard about RIP Medical Debt! on Democracy Now!, but they’ve been widely featured in the media, including John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. The whole segment is enlightening (and both hilarious and infuriating), but the part that features RIP Medical Debt! helping John Oliver make television history, in arguably the biggest giveaway of all time, starts at about 18 minutes in.

My family had to deal with medical debt. Without revealing personal details, it went on for a couple of years, including the typical harassing letters and phone calls — and also sometimes calling family members as well.

So both as a progressive, and personally, I’m very happy to donate $50 this month to RIP Medical Debt — which will be worth about $5,000 of debt relief for someone! Years or decades of dealing with debt isn’t how health care should work.

Thank you to everyone who voted, and please consider donating to them too. As long as we have medical debt, we need organizations like RIP Medical Debt fighting for us.

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Please come back for more tomorrow, or follow me on Twitter for political and “random” content, and also the December $50 donation poll, which will be opening up tomorrow.

Link and Twitter —

Link to RIP Medical Debt!: https://ripmedicaldebt.org/

And here’s a quote tweet from RIP Medical Debt after they found out they were a choice in the poll! Turning $50 into $5000 can be life-changing to someone currently saddled with medical debt.