Out of $140 billion in past-due medical bills reported on U.S. credit files, much of it disproportionately falls on Black Americans, Bloomberg News reported. Census data show that 28% of Black households have medical debt, compared with 17% of White households. The gap is even wider in certain parts of the country. In St. Louis County, where Walker lives, people living in communities of color are almost four times as likely to have medical debt in collections than people living in predominantly White communities, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute. Hospitals have performed heroic work to save lives amid the immense challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through it all, many institutions continued to pursue collection of medical debt. After George Floyd’s murder last year and the protests that followed, hospital groups and medical societies pledged to advance racial equity. The American Hospital Association called for “the hard but necessary work to make fundamental changes and address our society’s inequity,” and “real solutions that make a genuine difference.” Health-care companies can’t fix the root causes of the country’s systemic inequality, but doctors and hospitals can ensure their services don’t inflict financial harm on patients. For instance, they can determine how to screen patients for financial assistance and how to respond when a bill goes unpaid. But patient advocates say the medical industry perpetuates such harsh billing practices as garnishing wages, charging high interest rates, placing liens on homes, and suing patients. Those tactics often land harder on communities of color. Meanwhile, these aggressive billing practices bring in little revenue for hospitals—less than 1% of the total by some estimates, patient advocates say. “These are already people who’ve been struggling to pay,” says Jenifer Bosco, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center who co-wrote proposed legislation to strengthen protections for patients. “It’s not the way the hospitals are balancing their budgets.”
