- The United States is without peers internationally in the extent and depth of its medical debt crisis.
- Socialized healthcare in most other wealthy countries means that medical debt is minimal or essentially non-existent as a widespread issue.
- This past June, the international NGO Human Rights Watch condemned the current state of American medical debt, describing the situation as depriving American patients of human rights.
- Despite the magnitude of the US medical debt problem, its scope—and the role played by hospitals, mostly nonprofit institutions, in creating and monetizing that debt—has remained largely hidden.
- But reporting in recent years has shed new light on the extent to which medical debt has become big business and the role nonprofit hospitals have played as a driving force behind the change.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/nonprofit-hospitals-pursue-aggressive-medical-debt-collection/