Medical debt affects nearly 1 in 12 adults in the U.S., and Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to relieve Americans of this burden and cancel it altogether.
Recent research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows Americans owe around $220 billion in medical debt. As for Harris’ plan, the details haven’t quite been fleshed out, according to a news release from the White House, and it would require cooperation with states and Congress. But Harris isn’t the only one trying to do this.
North Carolina recently struck a deal under which hospitals will erase $4 billion in debt as part of a Medicaid expansion plan. California also implemented new protections for people with medical debt. The big question is: Will eliminating this debt actually solve the problem, or is it just treating the symptoms? Experts from Princeton say that even though it might help people in the short term, it’s not a long-term solution, and that medical debt will just continue to build up.
The real issue is health care prices, but fixing that would require a politically divided government to agree on a complex situation. In the meantime, states are focused on more micro-level approaches to aid this problem, such as preventing medical debt from appearing on credit reports or requiring hospitals to offer better financial help to low-income patients. Health care costs per person in the U.
S. were around $12,000 in 2022, which was over $4,000 more than in any other high-income nation, according to t.