To show the city of Atlanta a little love for the way they’ve embraced him in his rookie year, the Hawks’ Trae Young has donated $10,000 to help wipe out medical debt.
“The city of Atlanta has welcomed me with open arms,” said Young in a statement. “Giving back to this community is extremely important to me. I hope these families can find a bit of relief knowing that their bills have been taken care of as we enter the New Year.”
Young donated the hefty sum to RIP Medical Debt, an Atlanta organization that pays off the medical debt of individuals most in need. According to their website, RIP Medical Debt “uses donated funds to purchase portfolios of bundled medical debt on the secondary debt market for pennies on the dollar.” Because of the way medical debt works, Young’s donation was used to help wipe away $1,059,186.39 of debt. Again, per a release, the average amount abolished is $1,858 for 570 people. A spokesperson for the organization told CBS News that “every $1 donated relieves $100 worth of medical debt and the money goes to people earning less than twice the federal poverty level.”
I don’t know how the math on all this works, but that’s a not insignificant amount of money any way you slice it and it goes towards the city’s neediest citizens.
Young’s act is very generous, but it goes beyond just being a feel good story. It’s an absolute travesty that we live in a country where all but the very few have access to affordable health care. Anyone who’s navigated a medical bill or even tried to visit a doctor knows how fundamentally broken our health care system is. Even with good insurance and financial stability, health care bills can become overwhelming. There’s a reason over one-third of the requests on GoFundMe are health care related. Every day, there’s some new story about the outrageous cost of basic health care–like the insurer that charged $25,865 after a check up for cold. It’s a maddening loop that drives almost 530,000 families per year to bankruptcy.
While no individual alone can fix the system–that power lies in the hands of our elected officials–Young’s act acknowledges just how broken our health care system is and the cycle of poverty it can perpetuate. It’s hard to fight for institutional change, but the first step is acknowledging that the system is indeed broken.