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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.

The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now believes that the financial regulator she leads is unconstitutionally structured, CNBC.com reported. CFPB Director Kathleen Kraninger notified senior lawmakers yesterday that the bureau had determined that the law that established the agency in the wake of the financial crisis gave her too much independence. That brings her position in line with the one adopted by the Department of Justice in March 2017. “Mindful of the Bureau’s role as an Executive agency within the Executive Branch [...] I have decided that the Bureau should adopt the Department of Justice’s view,” Kraninger wrote in letters to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). She noted that the Department of Justice, on behalf of the bureau, had formally filed a brief with the Supreme Court including her new position. The case the brief was filed in connection with is Seila Law v. CFPB. Seila Law, a California law firm, is challenging the single-director structure of the bureau. Unlike the heads of some other agencies, the director of the CFPB can be removed by the president only for cause. In its brief with the Supreme Court, the Justice Department urged the justices to take up the case and find the structure of the agency unconstitutional. But, it said, it would be possible to limit the power of the agency’s director without scrapping it altogether.

The University of Virginia Health System, which sues thousands of patients each year, seizing wages and home equity to collect on overdue bills, said Friday it would increase financial assistance, give bigger discounts to the uninsured and “reduce our reliance on the legal system,” the Washington Post reported. Doug Lischke, UVA Health System’s chief financial officer, called the new policy “a first step” that could later include additional financial assistance. He said that the state-owned health-care system also plans to ask the Virginia General Assembly to change a law requiring state agencies, including health systems, to “aggressively collect” unpaid bills and charge 6 percent interest on the balance. But independent experts said the policy change, which comes on the heels of a Kaiser Health News investigation published in the Washington Post detailing the public medical center’s aggressive collection practices, still leaves numerous patients exposed to lawsuits and crippling bills. KHN found that UVA sued patients more than 36,000 times over six years ending in June 2018, sending many families into bankruptcy. It routinely billed uninsured patients for far more than what a typical insurance company would have paid. By leaving family assets vulnerable and not fully discounting list-price charges, the new guidelines remain “very tough on the poor and near-poor who have managed to amass anything of value that will help them with the daily costs of life,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy professor at George Washington University.

Bankrupt mortgage servicer Ditech Holding Corp. cleared the way for the $1.8 billion sales of its businesses by agreeing on Tuesday to preserve some homeowner claims like the right to fix mistakes on their loans, Bloomberg News reported. The accord ends a dispute over the sales, allowing Ditech to pay creditors and exit bankruptcy. A group of consumer creditors as well as attorneys general from about a dozen states objected to a previous plan to offload the assets in “free and clear” transactions. Those arrangements would have stripped homeowners of rights, including those that could help them save their homes from wrongful foreclosures, the New York attorney general’s office wrote in its objection to the sales. Late last month the federal judge overseeing the case sided with consumers and state authorities and rejected the sales. The bankruptcy court still needs to approve the new deal as part of Ditech’s bankruptcy plan. A hearing is slated for Sept. 25. After negotiations this month, Ditech and the consumer creditor group reached an agreement that creates a $10 million fund for claims holders and requires the appointment of a special master to hear consumer claims, Ditech lawyer Ray Schrock said in court. The sale doesn’t ratify mistakes in mortgage accounts and both Ditech and the new buyers have committed to investigate account misstatements and correct them.

U.S. consumer borrowing swelled in July by the most since late 2017 as Americans carried larger credit-card balances to fund both everyday and online purchases, Bloomberg News reported. Total credit rose by $23.3 billion from the prior month, exceeding all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists, Federal Reserve figures showed on Monday. Revolving debt outstanding increased by $10 billion, also the most since November 2017, while the growth of non-revolving credit was little changed from a month earlier. The gain in revolving credit outstanding, which includes credit card debt, followed a $186 million drop in June. Non-revolving debt that includes loans for school and cars advanced $13.3 billion after rising $14 billion.

American incomes remained essentially flat in 2018 after three straight years of growth, according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday that offer a broad look at U.S. households’ financial well-being, the Wall Street Journal reported. Median household income was $63,179 in 2018, an uptick of 0.9 percent that census officials said isn’t statistically significant from the prior year based on figures adjusted for inflation. The poverty rate in 2018 was 11.8 percent, a decrease of a half percentage point from 2017, marking the fourth consecutive annual decline in the national poverty rate. It was the first time the official poverty rate fell significantly below its level at the start of the recession in 2007. The share of Americans who lack health insurance rose for the first time since 2009, according to the figures. In 2018, 8.5 percent of people, or 27.5 million, didn’t have health insurance at any point during the year, compared with 7.9 percent of people, or 25.6 million, the previous year. That reversal comes years after the 2010 Affordable Care Act expanded insurance coverage to millions of Americans.