Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) released a plan on Saturday that proposes wiping out an estimated $81 billion in existing debt and changing rules around debt collection and bankruptcy, the New York Times reported. He also calls for replacing the giant credit reporting agencies with a “public credit registry” that would ignore medical debt when calculating credit scores. The plan calls for the government to negotiate and cancel the debts, though it does not specify the precise mechanism. While eliminating every American’s medical debt would probably not come cheap, Sanders’s plan could wind up costing far less than the total amount of debt he is seeking to cancel, according to some experts. Craig Antico, a founder of the charity RIP Medical Debt, which buys and forgives medical debt, estimated that the market price for $81 billion in debt could be as low as $500 million. Most past-due medical debt never gets paid, which is why bill collectors are often willing to sell the debts for pennies on the dollar.
