This Thanksgiving is a little sweeter for about 1,500 Nebraskans, knowing their medical debt was forgiven due to the work of some Creighton University students.
The Creighton chapter of Students for a National Health Program spent the past year holding fundraisers like bake sales, a flower sale and a dance-off event to raise about $10,000 that erased more than $2 million in medical debt.
They partnered with Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that negotiates with hospitals to buy medical debt at a lower price.
Allison Benjamin, who graduated from Creighton in May and was president of the campus chapter, used an example that Undue Medical Debt may buy $100 of medical debt for only $1.
“The reason that hospitals are willing to sell this is because they — and this is something that's interesting about medical debt — don't always think that it will get paid back,” Benjamin said.
“For the hospital, it's a better deal to have $1 instead of $0.”
The national organization focuses on medical debt for people at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level or who have medical debt that exceeds 5% of their income. Benjamin, who wrote her thesis on medical debt, said people who owe hospitals money are more likely to avoid further needed health care.
“Medical debt is also a risk factor for insecurity, inability to pay rent, mortgage and/or utilities, eviction or foreclosure, and homelessness,” Benjamin said.
“The spiral of economic disadvantage that results from personal debt, of which medical debt is now the largest contributor, tends to cluster in families and communities and crosses over to subsequent generations.”
She added that those debts are even worse for communities of color, especially Black and Latino communities. According to a 2022 KFF survey, more than half of Black and Hispanic respondents had medical debt, compared with 37% of White respondents.
Benjamin said "health care is a human right."
On average, the Creighton students helped forgive about $1,455 per person across 19 Nebraska counties.
The Creighton effort is similar to ones done by other organizations in recent years, including an Omaha church that raised $25,000 to help pay off $2.5 million in medical debt and a Lincoln church that raised more than half a million dollars to pay off medical debt of residents in its neighborhood.
Marshall Biven, a second-year medical student at Creighton, said the debt removal initiative "shows that there's a level of solidarity that we all kind of understand that we're in this together."
Biven said about 66% of personal bankruptcies are related to medical debt. He cited a ProPublica article about 10ten years ago that showed Nebraska had one of the highest rates of medical debt lawsuits in the country, some for bills as low as $60.
— Jolie Peal, Nebraska Public Media
