In a recent roundtable held in Greenville, Governor Josh Stein and NC Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Dev Sangvai sat down to discuss the strategies the state is implementing to combat the burgeoning issue of medical debt. In efforts to ease the financial strain on families, Governor Stein has made an appeal to the North Carolina General Assembly, urging them to cooperate in making health care costs more manageable. "Our state should be focused on reducing people's burdens, not piling them on," Stein claimed in a statement obtained by the Governor's Office press release.
Stein's administration has taken tangible steps towards financial reprieve, targeting credit reporting as a means to mitigate the long-term effects of medical debt. This month, as reported by the Governor's Office press release, Stein contacted major national credit reporting agencies, including Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, pushing for the exclusion of certain types of medical debts from credit reports and advocating for the removal of medical debt from consumer credit histories. Recently, he commemorated the groundbreaking of WakeMed's Whole Health Campus, promising a new mental health and well-being hospital designed to bolster the state's health infrastructure.
The state's proactive approach to medical debt relief has made significant progress. Governor Stein announced that North Carolina's medical debt relief program has wiped out over $6.5 billion of debt for more than 2.5 million North Carolinians in the past year alone. Letters from hospitals and the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, examples of which are available on the DHHS website, have been sent out, informing many of their cleared debt. This program, born under former Governor Roy Cooper's leadership, is detailed on Undue Medical Debt's Frequent Asked Questions page.
In a unique collaboration between NCDHHS, state acute care hospitals, and Undue Medical Debt, the Medical Debt Relief Program also looks to prevent new debts from piling up. Eligible hospitals, embracing enhanced payments supplied by the HASP, are expected to adopt more generous charity care policies to ease the process for North Carolinians seeking critical care. "Care should be accessible and healing, not a source of financial distress," Dr. Sangvai told the press, highlighting the emotional toll that unexpected financial hardship can impose on patients, as per the Governor's Office.
North Carolina's approach to medical debt—leveraging the state’s Medicaid program and focusing on the erasure of existing debt and the prevention of new—is a pioneering effort aimed at forging a path to resilient financial health for its residents. The Governor's office and NCDHHS continue to invest in measures that address social determinants of health, bolstering the state's commitment to preventative care and removing barriers that formerly inhibited residents from seeking necessary medical attention.
