(WTTW News)
More than 158,000 Cook County residents will be affected as part of a countywide medical debt relief program launched last year, Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle announced in a news release Tuesday. More than $280 million in medical debt has been eliminated.
As part of this program, Cook County officials will work with the national nonprofit organization RIP Medical Debt to purchase debt from health care providers in the county and provide debt relief for eligible residents based on financial hardship. I have to.
“We basically buy it for the same price that we sell it to debt collectors,” Preckwinkle said of the show in an interview on “Chicago Tonight” in May. “We buy it, we cancel the debt, we send our families. Individuals find their debt canceled.”
In the latest round of medical debt relief, the county canceled more than $173 million in debt for more than 85,000 patients at the University of Chicago Medical School. Each Chicago Medicine patient received an average of about $2,000 in debt relief. More than 75% of patient households reported annual incomes of less than $51,000, officials said.
Program recipients are eligible for relief if they are a Cook County resident and have an income up to 400% of current federal poverty guidelines or have medical debt that is at least 5% of their estimated annual household income. There is no way to apply to this program. Instead, RIP Medical Debt performs an analysis of your hospital debt portfolio to identify eligible accounts. According to Cook County’s website.
The county allocated $12 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act’s COVID-19 Recovery Fund to fund the program.
Neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides have seen their highest amount of medical debt canceled ever, officials said. Residents living in ZIP codes 60629, 60619 and 60620, which include parts of Chicago Lawn, Chatham and Auburn Gresham, are among the top three ZIP codes with the highest amount of debt forgiven, totaling more than $38 million. .
“People feel a lot of anxiety when they have medical debt,” RIP Medical Debt President and CEO Alison Sesso said in an interview about the program on “Chicago Tonight” in January. Told. “If they think they owe medical debt, actually owe medical debt, or are worried that they might owe medical debt, they won’t go to the hospital to get the care they need. ”
Contact Eunice Alpasan: @eunicealpasan | 773-509-5362 | [email protected]
