Drug Industry-Funded Republican Speaks Out Against Medical Debt Cancellation

A Republican senator largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry spoke out Thursday against calls to cancel medical debt, saying that erasing a financial burden on 100 million Americans “is not a solution.”

“One-time medical debt forgiveness…is a band-aid solution to a one-time problem that will come back,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on the nation’s medical debt crisis.

After rejecting medical debt cancellation on the grounds that it would not address the “root causes” of the crisis, Cassidy, the ranking member of the Senate panel, made clear that he opposes the kinds of transformative health care reforms that advocates of the idea say are needed to eliminate the medical debt problem for good.

“We may hear about Medicare for All today,” Cassidy predicted. “But I also say that a health care system where you think it’s free because the taxpayer is paying the bill … you never see how expensive something can be until you realize it’s free.”

Look at Cassidy’s remarks:

Cassidy is a major recipient of campaign money from the pharmaceutical industry, whose stranglehold on prescription drug prices has been a major driver of medical debt in the United States.

Over the course of his career, the Louisiana Republican has raised more than $1 million in donations from the pharmaceutical and health product industries, according to OpenSecrets.

STAT NewsLast year, a report said Cassidy had collected “a series of campaign donations” from Big Pharma executives shortly after he officially became the top Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — a vocal proponent of canceling medical debt and enacting Medicare for All.

In May, Sanders and several Democratic allies introduced a bill that would eliminate all of the roughly $220 billion in outstanding medical debt in the United States.

Contrary to Cassidy’s suggestion that the bill would do nothing to prevent future medical debt from accruing, Sanders’ legislation “would amend the Public Health Service Act, updating billing and debt collection requirements to limit the potential for future debt,” the senator’s office noted in a summary.

Neale Mahoney, a medical debt expert at Stanford University, said in a statement after the bill was unveiled that the measure “cuts off medical debt at the source by requiring hospitals to meet their obligation to provide charity care to eligible patients who cannot afford to pay and supports hospitals so they can forgive debt before it is sold to debt collectors.”

In his opening remarks at Thursday’s hearing, Sanders called medical debt “one of the most outrageous and cruel aspects” of the country’s “dysfunctional” health care system.

“Drug companies and insurance companies are making Americans pay for the ‘crime’ of getting sick,” Sanders said. “Let’s be clear: Our country’s medical debt crisis is a uniquely American phenomenon, one that does not exist in any other country in the world.”

“We are the only major country in the world,” the senator added, “where an emergency hospital visit can result in the loss of a patient’s home and life savings.”

A recent poll found that a majority of Americans believe it is “extremely or very important” that the federal government take action to help people with medical debt. The health policy organization KFF estimates that about 3 million American adults owe more than $10,000 in medical debt, and 14 million owe more than $1,000.

Abdul El-Sayed, director of the Wayne County, Michigan, Department of Health, Human Services and Veterans Affairs and a vocal proponent of Medicare for All, said in his testimony at Thursday’s hearing that a single-payer health care system would “address the porous nature of health insurance” and help prevent the accumulation of medical debt “by ensuring universal health insurance coverage from birth.”

“One of the biggest cost drivers of our current system is the administrative burden, which is higher in our country than in any other country in the world,” El-Sayed said. “Much of that burden is imposed by the complexity of billing multiple health insurers. With a single, non-profit insurer, we could eliminate some of that financial burden, ultimately reducing the costs Americans incur in medical debt.”