“Medical debt is a social determinant of health,” she said. “Families delay care when they have debt, because they fear going to a health care setting … and it widens the health disparity gaps that exist in our communities because — guess what? — medical debt disproportionately impacts communities of color, rural communities, medically underserved communities. So this is also a health equity success for us, especially for those of us who are in public health.” Oakland County Commissioner Charlie Cavell, a Democrat who serves the cities of Berkley, Ferndale, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge and portions of Birmingham and Royal Oak, helped push for this program as he knows the burden of carrying medical debt. Cavell recalled how he contracted giardia after a mission trip to Haiti years ago and ended up in a Florida emergency room. Cavell didn’t have health insurance, and that one night cost more than $6,000. The debt followed him for years as his credit score took a hit, he said, which led to him living in month-to-month apartments that didn’t check his credit, and he wasn’t able to buy his first car until he was 28 because of his credit. “There’s lots of ripple effects of medical debt,” he said. “The vast majority of RIP’s work is paying $25 to pay off a $2,500 medical debt, which was incurred because someone had a deductible they cannot afford. And today we’re fixing that.” Kyra Taylor, of Detroit, has seen firsthand her medical debt wiped clean by the nonprofit. Taylor, 34, has undergone multiple transplants, receiving two kidneys and a pancreas. She was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 10 and had her insurance cut off when she was 18. She recounted how she worked at a minimum wage job, but it didn’t offer insurance. Taylor also tried applying for assistance with the state government, but she was told she made too much money. According to Taylor, her insulin costs $100 a bottle, which lasts three weeks. But because she had to pay rent and her medical bills, she had to cut back on her medicine and use something she wasn’t supposed to be taking that cost less in order to survive. It didn’t matter, as Taylor put it, because she was drowning in debt. She told C & G Newspapers that she had accumulated “tens of thousands” of dollars in debt. “My medical debt, it was so high that when I would finish paying what I could pay, rent, the medical debt, so far, I would only be left with like $10. And you can’t do nothing with $10. You can’t buy food, we can’t pay rent, nothing like that,” she said. At one point, Taylor was in her last steps to file bankruptcy when she received a letter from RIP Medical Debt. She threw the letter away at first but checked it again to see that her medical debt was gone. The organization had purchased and erased $3,600 of her debt. “This has given me my life back,” she said of her debt being gone. “I can travel, I can go to work, I can pay my bills.”

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