Troy Methodist church helps wipe out medical debt for thousands in Madison County
Troy United Methodist Church is helping to wipe out medical debt for thousands of Madison County residents.
Church members raised $30,000 in partnership with the non-profit group, RIP Medical Debt, and that money has been leveraged to purchase about $4.8 million worth of outstanding medical debt for 5,142 county residents, according to a church news release.
“It has nothing to with (coronavirus),” Director of Communications Anna Belmonte said in a phone interview Monday. “We started this back in December. The initiative was to demonstrate in a tangible way the kind of forgiveness that we have of our sins in Jesus Christ.”
The church plans to notify the beneficiaries in late March or early April that their debt has been eliminated with no strings attached.
“Outstanding medical debt places financial and mental stress on families, dropping a person’s credit score, causing money to be garnished from their paychecks, and sometimes making it difficult to even purchase the essentials,” the release stated.
People whose debt was eligible for cancellation met the following criteria: They are residents of Madison County; they earn less than twice that designated for the federal poverty level; their debt payments exceeded 5% of their annual incomes; and they faced insolvency.
RIP Medical Debt is a non-profit organization founded in 2014 by two former debt collections executives, Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton, according to its website.
“Over the course of decades in the debt-buying industry, Craig and Jerry met with thousands of Americans saddled with unpaid and un-payable medical debt and realized they were uniquely qualified to help these people in need,” it states.
“They used their expertise and compassion to create a unique way to forgive medical debt: they would use donations to buy large bundles of medical debt and then forgive that debt with no tax consequences to donors or recipients.”
RIP is based in New York. It has eliminated about $1.4 billion in medical debt for more than 650,000 individuals and families, the website states.
This story was originally published March 23, 2020 at 1:24 PM.
