A CBS-affiliated local TV station in Seattle is sending notices to about 1,000 area residents telling them that the station has wiped out a portion of their overdue medical bills.
After interviewing a woman who was unable to afford cancer treatment due to the hospital bills she would incur, KIRO-TV worked with a New York-based charity called RIP Medical Debt to buy $1 million worth of debt owed by people in the station’s coverage area.
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“I am a cancer survivor,” Jesse Jones, who reported on the woman’s story for KIRO, told Poynter. “When you have $200,000 in medical bills, even with insurance, you are on the hook for some of that…I said ‘Let’s talk about the people who have issues, big issues with the bills that have forced them into bankruptcy, forcing them to make choices about whether to get treatment.'”
According to its website, RIP Medical Debt, a 501(c)3 organization that was founded by former debt collectors, “locates, buys and forgives medical debt across America, the only industrialized nation on earth with personal medical debt.”
The group works with donors like KIRO and forgives debts held by hospitals’ and doctors’ neediest patients, as a tax-free gift to each patient. The TV station did not see the names of any of the people whose debt they were clearing.
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