Medical Debt Snares Millions of People. States, Red and Blue are Passing Laws to Help
By: Noam Levey | NPR | October 7, 2024
While hot-button health care issues such as abortion and the Affordable Care Act roil the presidential race, Democrats and Republicans in statehouses around the country have been quietly working together to tackle the nation’s medical debt crisis.
New laws to curb aggressive hospital billing, to expand charity care for lower-income patients, and to rein in debt collectors have been enacted in more than 20 states since 2021.
Democrats championed most measures. But the legislative efforts often passed with Republican support. In a few states, GOP lawmakers led the push to expand patient protections.
“Regardless of their party, regardless of their background … any significant medical procedure can place people into bankruptcy,” Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, a conservative Republican, said in an interview. “This is a real issue.”
Renner, who has shepherded controversial measures to curb abortion rights and expand the death penalty in Florida, this year also led an effort to limit when hospitals could send patients to collections. It garnered unanimous support in the Florida Legislature.
Bipartisan measures in other states have gone further, barring unpaid medical bills from consumer credit reports and restricting medical providers from placing liens on patients’ homes.
About 100 million people in the U.S. are burdened by some form of health care debt, forcing millions to drain savings, take out second mortgages, or cut back on food and other essentials, KFF Health News has found. A quarter of those with debt owed more than $5,000 in 2022.
“Republicans in the legislature seem more open to protecting people from medical debt than from other kinds of debt,” said Marceline White, executive director of Economic Action Maryland, which helped lead efforts in that state to stop medical providers from garnishing the wages of low-income patients. That bill drew unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans
“There seems to be broad agreement that you shouldn’t lose your home or your life savings because you got ill,” White said. “That’s just a basic level of fairness.”
Read the full article from NPR here.