Anti-Debt Hero #2 – Jared Walker
For the last ten years, Jared has headed up a medical charity called Dollar For.
At first, he simply raised money to help pay medical bills for low income families.
However – he then realized that many of these families could have qualified for free hospital care.
Under the Affordable Care Act. non-profit hospitals must waive or reduce charges for lower-income uninsured patients. The hospitals must prove that they are providing a community benefit, thus justifying their tax exemption.
(A study in Cook County- Illinois in 2016 showed that hospitals there avoided over $200 million a year in property taxes. They can easily give some amount of free or discounted care.)
Hospitals are required to make the debt forgiveness provisions known. However, a lot of times they would just put a poster in their emergency room…or they would add fine print on the back of the bill.
Walker then started reading the actual policies, filling out paperwork, and advocating for patients….and in the first couple of months he got a million dollars in medical bills to disappear for people in the Portland metro area.
,Per Walker: “I thought, okay, this is like, this works. It’s real. Why doesn’t anyone know about it? ….So I got on TikTok, I made a 60 second video that told people what Charity Care was, and it went viral.”
Walker was able to recruit a group of volunteers, who captured the financial assistance policy data for 8,200 hospitals.
Now, a patient who contacts Dollar For can know quickly if they are eligible. They will get connected to a patient advocate, who will fill out all the paperwork, submit it to the hospital and, and advocate on their behalf until the bills are waived.
The Limits of Free Care
Walker did find some “glitches” in the program. (It’s the ACA…what do you expect?)
About 50% of hospitals will require you to not have any type of insurance to get charity care. So they’ll ask you, if you have any type of commercial insurance, through your employer, whatever…if so, you are not eligible for charity care at all, even if you have a $12,000 deductible.
Also, the charity care rules apply only to hospitals. Doctors and other practitioners might adjust your bill to meet what the hospital offers you. For example, if the hospital forgave 100% of your bill, then they would too. If the hospital forgave 50%, then they could cut your bill in half to match the decision.
Walker wants hospitals to use “presumptive eligibility”. If a patient is on SNAP benefits, or any other public service benefits, that would be an obvious indicator that they’re eligible for charity care. In that case, they won’t even ask for an application, they’ll just write the bills off.
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