| Topics and Issues | Medical debt (53) |
In August 2024, the Harris/Walz campaign issued a press release highlighting its economic agenda. The opening paragraph notes medical debt:
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing several proposals for her first 100 days in office to bring down costs for American families. The steps announced today will cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the costs of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans. These bold actions will address some of the sharpest pain points American families are confronting and bolster their financial security.
Likely following on a model recently established with Gov. Roy Cooper (D) of North Carolina,
Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will also work with states to cancel medical debt for millions of Americans and to help them avoid accumulating such debt in the future, because no one should go bankrupt just because they had the misfortune of becoming sick or hurt. This plan builds on Vice President Harris’ leadership in removing medical debt from nearly all Americans’ credit reports and in helping secure American Rescue Plan funds to cancel $7 billion of medical debt for up to 3 million Americans.
Note a story in The Hill: Harris, Walz lean into erasing medical debt. Here, Harris is taking credit for the voluntary initiatives from the nationwide credit bureaus:
Harris has been leading the Biden administration’s initiatives on medical debt relief, including working with credit reporting companies Equifax, TransUnion and Experian to voluntarily remove some unpaid medical debt from people’s credit reports.
That effort helped about 30 million Americans remove unpaid debt from their credit reports.
The Hill story gives Harris credit for proposing rules for the CFPB, something she cannot do: “In June, Harris and the CFPB proposed new rules that would ban agencies from considering medical debt when calculating credit scores.”