Hospital sy so much for let us be here North Carolina is launching a first of its kind in the nation effort to ease medical debt under which so many North Carolinians suffer we've been given approval by the center for Medica Aid Medicare to use federal health care access and stabilization payments hasp payments many people in the medical Arena know about that we've been able to to get to to use those to incentivize hospitals to do the right thing and forgive medical debt for low to Middle inome people and avoid the creation of medical d on them in the future having access to health and what makes you healthy is a basic human right and that we have to use every lever we have to go after making it easier for people to be healthy no one chooses to go into medical debt no one chooses to have cancer they don't choose to have a heart attack they don't choose to get in a car accident and when they show up at the emergency room they don't say hold on a minute what's the price second hospitals spend considerable time and energy chasing this debt with calls and letters and staff trying to get debt that as Governor Cooper said is never collected Pennies on the dollar and yet with all of that activity yielding very little value 67% of bankruptcies in this country are attributed to Medical debt this policy is the potential to treat this disease in our health system it breaks this cycle of sickness where people face high costs and stuck in EDS by wiping away debt back to January 1st 2014 for people up to 350% of the federal poverty limit and looking forward it allows hospitals to focus on their mission and what we know they care so deeply about caring for their communities by putting in place higher standards for charity care policies and better practices for debt collection for those parts of debt that do need to be collected and a responsibility to get people enrolled in the charity care pro programs that they already have good afternoon everyone my name is Jose penabad and I am a board member at undue medical debt and I'm also a fellow North caran living here in Raleigh um our organization is now celebrating its 10th anniversary and we have worked to relieve over $113 billion in medical debt for over 8.6 million people in the United States and we have touched every single state of the union soon we are looking forward to working with our friends here in North Carolina to continue that mission as we also try to knock down $4 billion of debt in our great state our long-term goal is to work in partnership in collaboration with the healthcare system with patients and with the government to really attack the root causes Upstream that are causing medical debt that impact many of our friends family and neighbors but as we look around today what we see is a situation where many of our fellow Americans and indeed our country finds itself in a hole being dug by medical debt and growing up my parents taught me that the first rule about getting out of a hole is to stop digging so that's what we're here to try to do today is stop digging the hole and with that we'll talk a little bit about how undo has worked with other hospitals and provider groups Across the Nation and why we think North Carolina's approach could really be successful in the past we've approached Hospital groups and we have purchased medical debt from hospital groups and providers across the country as I mentioned typically for pennies on the dollar and we are creating what we believe is a win-win situation not just for the patient but for the hospitals themselves our organization is buying debt that is truly economically worth nothing it is uncollectible statistically and it's been written off in most cases as an accounting write off by the time we see it so we're giving money to hospitals essentially for for something that's worthless and in turn turning it around and forgiving debt for the people who owe [Music] it you Adit that [Music]