the Assembly: “North Carolina officials had been quietly laboring for months on an ambitious plan to tackle the state’s mammoth medical debt problem when Gov. Roy Cooper stepped before cameras in July to announce the initiative.
But as Cooper stood by the stairs of the executive mansion and called for “freeing people from medical debt,” the future of his administration’s work hung in the balance….
Less than six weeks later, the gamble paid off. The state received a federal blessing. And every one of North Carolina’s 99 hospitals agreed to the state’s demands.
In exchange for federal money, hospitals would wipe out billions of dollars of patient debt and adopt new standards to shield patients from crippling bills.
“It’s a model that the rest of the country could adopt,” said Jared Walker, founder of Dollar For, a national nonprofit that helps patients get financial aid from hospitals. “This is what we’ve been fighting for.””