A Mississippi woman, now 60, raised $21,000 from neighbors, and the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt converted it into $3.2 million in erased medical debt for more than 1,600 people. Beth Mayeaux of Jackson ran the eight-week campaign, which ended Sept. 29, Mississippi Today reported. Recipients do not apply and do not pay anything. They receive a letter saying a past-due balance has been cleared.
How the Water Valley Medical Debt Fundraiser Started
Mayeaux, who works in education sales, and her wife, Robbie Fischer, started the campaign in August with a first gift of $1,966, the year Mayeaux was born. She named it “Getting (G)older, Giving Back.” She wrote letters to about 400 contacts, and most of the money came from individual neighbors rather than large grants, Mississippi Today reported.
The money was aimed at Yalobusha and Calhoun counties in north-central Mississippi. Water Valley, a town of about 3,400 people, was the center of the effort. Mississippi Today reported that more than 25% of Water Valley residents live below the poverty line, compared with 18% statewide. Money left over after those counties was directed to the Mississippi Delta, where Fischer is from.
The pitch reached a room at Church of the Nativity in Water Valley. Eddie Woods, the church treasurer, said Mayeaux told the group she wanted to raise $3,000 from them. “And the room went silent,” Woods told Mississippi Today. Mary Beth Pulsifer, the church’s senior warden, said she thought it sounded like a lot of money.
Kerry O’Donoghue, a Water Valley resident, gave anyway. “I was absolutely all in, and also furious that we live in a country where this is needed,” she told the outlet.
How $21,000 Becomes $3.2 Million In Medical Debt
Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit, does not pay people’s bills one at a time. It buys bundles of past-due medical accounts from hospitals and collectors at steep discounts, then cancels them. Debt buyers pay little for these accounts because collectors expect most patients to be unable to pay in full.
Marisa Clemente, the group’s vice president of philanthropy, told Mississippi Today that the campaign’s funds will help more than 1,600 people. Undue says each dollar donated can relieve up to $100 in debt. Allison Sesso, the group’s CEO, described the model to WBUR’s “Here & Now” this month. “One dollar gets rid of $100 of medical debt,” she said.
Divide the figures in the Mississippi Today report and the scale becomes clearer. The $21,000 raised works out to about $13 for each person helped. The $3.2 million in cleared debt is about 152 times the money raised, which is higher than the “up to $100” per dollar rate Undue cites, and Mississippi Today does not explain the difference. The $3.2 million in cleared debt works out to about $2,000 for each person.
Recipients are targeted by income and debt load rather than by application. Mississippi Today said Undue seeks people who earn at or below four times the federal poverty level, or whose medical debt exceeds 5% of their income. Cleared debt does not create a tax bill for the recipient.
What Medical Debt Relief Does and Does Not Change
Medical debt is a national problem. WBUR, citing a federal survey, reported that Americans carry $220 billion in medical debt. The Here & Now segment also profiled Brittany Gurney of Mesa, Arizona, a divorced mother of two whose son needed nine surgeries for a bowel obstruction in September 2020. Her share of the hospital bill was $15,000. Undue cleared the balance through a partnership with the state of Arizona.
States are starting to pay for this kind of relief themselves. WBUR reported that Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced in September that the state would set aside $2.5 million to cancel medical debt for about 130,000 residents. That works out to about $19 for each resident, close to the $13 per person in Water Valley. Arizona committed $10 million in federal pandemic relief money to its program.
Undue was founded in 2014 by Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton, both former debt collectors, and was then called RIP Medical Debt. KFF Health News reported in 2022 that it had erased $6.7 billion in debt for 3.6 million people. Debts are chosen from the portfolios available for purchase, so nobody can request relief for a specific bill, Sesso told KFF Health News. Critics say the approach comes too late for patients. “A lot of damage will have been done by the time they come in to relieve that debt,” Mark Rukavina of the group Community Catalyst said in the same report. He argued for stronger enforcement of hospital financial assistance programs.
Research on whether relief improves lives is mixed. Wesley Yin, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that cancellation raised access to credit by about 10%. His team also found “no measurable impacts on depression, anxiety, self-reported sense of wellbeing,” WBUR reported.
Barbara Phillips, a civil rights attorney, told Mississippi Today that the Water Valley effort shows what neighbors can do. “Your imagination does not limit our reality,” she said. For the 1,600 or so people in the two regions, the result arrives as a letter in the mail.
