Nothing to See Here

“There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that except for the fact that absolutely everything is wrong with that.”

You may have seen this already, but I thought it deserves as wide an audience as it can get, so here it is.

There are all sorts of ways to buy debt in our country, and much of the debt an enterprising young capitalist can purchase is medical debt.  Which is to say, the debt that people run up through getting sick, and being hospitalized, and undergoing surgery and having tests, and being prescribed drugs.

Assuming you have a plausible-sounding company, you too can buy this debt, and at a whacking great discount, too.  Which means that you can start making threatening telephone calls, and putting liens on people’s homes, and taking their property and dunning their wages and blackguarding their credit ratings, and all that makes our credit system great.

One thing that you don’t actually know is whether any of this debt is legitimate.  Because of the complexity of medical practice and debt laws— which were not written by, say, patients or debtors—  a great many people don’t understand their legal rights, and can have their lives ruined, their savings taken, and their homes foreclosed on, to pay a debt that they don’t actually owe.

So what HBO’s own John Oliver did was to form a plausible-sounding company, and bought $14.7 million in medical debt for $60,000.

And then he did something with it.  For which, see the video.

Here’s the article.