LA County to eliminate $500 million in medical debt for thousands of residents

There's no such thing as a free market for healthcare. If I'm having a heart attack, I can't weigh the costs and benefits of calling an ambulance or going to the hospital, or even choosing which hospital I go to or who I see in the hospital. I'm dying and I need my life saved.

I get the sentiment, but medical debt forgiveness this way is nothing new. It's not helpful to lambast every single good story with dooming. Constant despair isn't helping us move the needle and fight back. Point out the fights where they, otherwise we're just making people too despaired to fight at all

The non-profit they partnered with has been doing work forgiving debt since 2014. And there's been high profile cases of people doing this too. In 2016, John Oliver forgave $15 million worth of medical debt for ~9 thousand people

Other local governments have done the same thing with the same non-profit:

In January this year, New York City said they were going to do the same for around 2 billion worth of medical debt for 500 thousand people over 3 years (paying around $18 million to buy that debt)

In 2023, Oakland County Michigan forgave around $200 million (paying around $2 million for the debt)

And so on

When debt isn't paid off for long enough / they think it'll be too much work to collect, it's often sold by those organizations to private debt collectors. Here instead of collecting the debt, they just buy the debt then agree to forgive it