Help forgive WA medical debt!

This is just a heads up that there’s a fundraising campaign to forgive outstanding medical debt here in WA right now, via Undue Medical Debt. I’ll explain a little bit about what this is and how it works, if you already know/don’t care feel free to skip to the link to the campaign at the bottom.

If you haven’t heard of this style of debt relief before, the way it works is that brokers buy and sell outstanding medical debt at a steep discount, based on how old it is/how likely they think it is to ever be repaid (so a bill for $10,000, for example, might be sold for $100). It’s honestly a pretty bleak feature of our health care system imo, but the silver lining of it is that charitable groups (and Jon Oliver) can buy up a bunch of this debt for pennies on the dollar and cancel it, relieving the person who owes that money and substantially improving their financial situation. That’s basically Undue’s MO – they allow anyone to start a crowdfunding campaign and raise money with the goal of purchasing and cancelling medical debt. They operate nationwide, and campaigns can be for general debt cancellation, but they can also be regionally targeted and state-specific. They actually did another WA-specific campaign last year too, which got some coverage from KUOW.

State-specific campaigns are typically a little more involved because the first step is to find debt in a given state that they’re able to acquire, and so usually they set a floor for the minimum amount that needs to be raised (i.e. $10,000 to cancel at least $1mill in debt; $15,000 for $1.5mill; etc). My understanding is that it’s because the debt broker they work with has a minimum amount that they need in order to do a state-specific deal. If a campaign doesn’t hit that target, the money raised is still used to forgive medical debt, it just might not be specifically tailored to the target area that the host selected.

With all that said, the reason I’m sharing this now is because there’s currently a campaign going for WA medical debt relief which has already hit their minimum and is still open for more donations. So with that floor already met, it means that anything else they raise from here on out will piggyback off of that success to increase the total impact that this campaign has for people in our state. And again, they typically expect about a 100x return on these campaigns, so giving $25 would forgive $2500, etc. If you’re interested, here’s the link!

And one more thing: don’t be dissuaded by the name of the campaign, or the fact that it’s hosted by a church! You aren’t donating to the church, and they are not receiving or handling these funds – they were just the organization who happened to start this particular campaign (although to their credit, they appear to have also contributed almost all of the $15k raised so far, which is pretty cool).

Again, I don’t work for Undue, and I don’t belong to the Moses Lake Presbyterian Church (or any church). I’m just someone who has seen people I love struggle with medical debt, and this is a cause that’s personally important to me. If you have the resources to contribute, it’s a great opportunity to stretch your dollar and make life a little easier for our fellow Washingtonians.