Americans Hold $140 Billion In Overdue Medical Debt

The American healthcare system is so broken and dysfunctional that the American public now has $140 billion worth of medical debt IN COLLECTIONS. This system is absolutely unsustainable, but so far there is little action taking place to actually move us toward a universal healthcare / single payer system. Americans will continue to feel the burden of this debt, and the financial consequences of it, until the system is overhauled from the ground up. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

In case you needed another reason to support Medicare For All here in the United States, think of the number 140 billion, 140 billion, that is the amount of dollars that American citizens have as of today in medical debt that is already in collections. Okay. That's not the overall total amount of medical debt in the United States. No, no, no. That's the number of overdue medical debt that has been turned over to collection agencies. Collection agencies that now ruin people's credit scores, prevent them from buying a car, buying a house, being able to take out any kind of loan. Hell, in certain instances, if it hurts your credit report enough, it could prevent people from getting a job, by the way, explain the concept of a credit report to people over in Europe and they're going to look at you like you just tried to explain a donkey and an elephant making love because they have no idea what that is because they don't have to deal with this. But we do and of course, we also have to deal with a for-profit healthcare system that they don't have to deal with, a healthcare system that is just sending people into debt left and right.

Debt on its own is bad enough, right? Debt that goes into collections can haunt people for years. It can absolutely again, by destroying these ridiculous credit reports that we have as American citizens, can ruin somebody's life. Can prevent them from moving forward. I know because I was in a situation last summer where the same thing happened to me. I had a medical debt, $200. I think it was actually $213, that I didn't even realize I'd had and it was because my doctor misbilled my insurance for a well visit. But I didn't know it was there. It went to collections, tried to take out a mortgage, buy a new house, couldn't because that one thing had dropped my credit just enough to prevent me from moving on, from moving my family to a better house. One, one $213 bill in collections. So that's why this story is a little bit personal for me too, because within the last 12 months, I, I'm, I've been there too. And granted $213 is nothing compared to what some of these individuals do also have in collections.

I mean, thousands and thousands of dollars. But folks, we can end this. We could end this with Medicare For All. You'd own nothing at point of service. We could rid of this thing called medical debt here in the United States. But we have to have more lawmakers willing to do it because anything short of that, and we're just barking in the dark at this point. You have to elect people who want a Medicare For All or universal healthcare or single payer, whatever the hell you want to call it because it's gone through many different names over the last 10 years, but the point is healthcare for all for free. No more medical debt. No more choosing between your prescriptions and food for the day. No more having this debt destroy your credit. No more being held back just because you got sick. Imagine how much this country could leap forward if we only had more politicians willing to do something about our for-profit healthcare system.