While negotiations over the Fiscal Year 2025 state budget continue, state and local officials gathered Wednesday morning in Lansing to highlight an appropriation from the current 2024 budget that will provide financial relief to thousands of Michiganders.
Senate Appropriations Chair Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) joined with local government officials and health advocates to highlight the local impact of a $4.5 million appropriation that was included in a supplemental budget bill passed in November.
Anthony said that when leaders were crafting the budget last year — the first under a Legislature controlled by Democrats in nearly 40 years — they gave a real focus to issues that would help lift people out of poverty and give a fair shot to working and middle class Michiganders.
Program aims to eliminate $700M in medical debt for Wayne County residents
“And one of the things that we had heard about at coffee hours and in the grocery store, and in our own families, was this concept of medical debt,” said Anthony. “Something that was hamstringing the pocketbooks of men and women in almost every corner of our state and across the country. So after 40 years of not having a seat at the table, finally the voters decided that the Democratic trifecta should stand in the gap for them. And this is one big initiative that we led on.”
Anthony said that the $4.5 million appropriation will now be leveraged to10 times that amount through collaborations with RIP Medical Debt, a national nonprofit that works with healthcare providers including hospitals, health systems, and physicians groups to find ways to alleviate medical debt for affected residents.
“These state dollars go directly to local governments,” she said. “When you stop to consider the local matching funds and the partnerships on the ground, the $4.5 million quickly grows to provide an estimated $450 million in medical debt relief for approximately 180,000 Michigan residents.”
There are similar efforts across the country. Connecticut, New Jersey and many counties and cities also are using public money to purchase and forgive millions of dollars of their residents’ medical debt, Stateline reports.
Among the local officials present was Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, who noted that the funding was not a business initiative, but instead what he called “a people thing,” that has a very real impact on people’s lives. As an example, Evans pointed to a similar effort in Wayne County to retire approximately $700 million in medical debt for about 300,000 residents there.
“I think it’s really significant, but what is more significant, I think, is the cooperation here in the House and the Senate to understand that there are people issues that we have to deal with, not just other issues,” said Evans. “So we’re hitting the ground running, we’re excited and we’ll piece together funds from other places, but the genesis had to start somewhere and the work you all did was critically important.”
Also present was Oakland County Deputy Executive Madiha Tariq, who runs the county’s Health and Human Services and the Public Services departments. She spoke about the connection between medical debt and people’s overall health.
“People with medical debt delay care because, ‘How do you pay for it, right?’ So they delay care, it increases the burden of disease in our communities and it also widens the health disparity gap,” she said. “I’m a public health practitioner, so through the course of my career I’ve seen countless people not go to the doctor because they had fear of getting caught or just fear of accumulating more medical debt.”
Tariq said medical debt is also a major contributor to deepening the cycle of poverty, which is itself a social determinant of health, thus has a compounding effect on communicable disease, chronic disease and mental health.
“I think this is why it’s so important as leaders, all of us, to look at something like medical debt as a public health issue,” she said. “One in 5 Americans suffer from medical debt in Oakland County. That translates to about 14,000 people that are in severe medical debt. And I just have to say, I’m so excited that behind me, around me in this building, in this state, in this country, we have so many advocates that understand the public health impact of something like medical debt.”
Kalamazoo County Commissioner Jen Strebs related a personal story of a co-worker who had overcome homelessness, but had suffered diabetes since childhood. When he developed a persistent toothache, she and other colleagues encouraged him to get checked out, but he resisted for fear of the cost. When he didn’t come in to work the next couple of days, they checked up on him and found that he had died.
“He was gone at 21 years of age for a simple health condition that shouldn’t be a barrier to anybody in this community,” said Strebs. “He was a wonderful young man serving people full of love and potential. And his life was lost because of the risk and fear he had of medical debt in Kalamazoo County. We don’t want that happening to anyone else. It shouldn’t happen to anyone in a country like ours.”
Anthony agreed, and said finding money for issues like this was among the highest reasons she ran for public office.
“This is the work to actually uplift people,” she said, noting that not every day was like that. “Some days are really hard and some days you’ve got to vote for stuff you don’t want and it’s tough. But at the end of the day, if we can do more of this, more people centered work, I do believe we’ll actually be proud of the service that we’re embarking on.”
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