4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
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0:00.0 | This football season get a hand from Betfair's popular BetBuilder and easily add our fan favourite football selections to your bet slip in just one tap. |
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0:30.0 | Lizzie Presser reports for Propublica. She lives in Brooklyn, but she spent a lot of her summer in Kansas in a little town called Coffeeville. |
0:45.0 | Coffeeville's is kind of old historic town in southeast Kansas, so right over the Oklahoma border. |
0:53.0 | The downtown is lined with these congorgeous turn of the century brick buildings, but all the old department stores and restaurants and boutiques are shuttered. |
1:03.0 | Coffeeville has a poverty rate that's twice the national average. |
1:08.0 | In the last few years, Amazon has shut down a local distribution warehouse. John Deere, laid off workers too. |
1:15.0 | And the largest employer is an oil refinery, and the second largest employer is the hospital. |
1:23.0 | The hospital is what brought Lizzie here. |
1:27.0 | Because when the people who live here can't afford to pay that hospital a lot of the time, the hospital takes them to court. |
1:34.0 | So can you describe what it's like on a hearing day when you come in and people are there to figure out what's happened with their medical debt? |
1:45.0 | When I went to the last Tuesday of July, 90 people had been summoned. This is a town of 9,000. Only about 35 showed up. |
1:56.0 | Many of the debtors are sick and you can see it. They're in their pajamas. They are wearing eye patches or bandages. |
2:07.0 | They're limping in one case. I saw a guy in a wheelchair who had a wound vacuum pumping so that he could get liquid to his wounds. |
2:16.0 | He had just had a heart attack and he was called into court. |
2:21.0 | They sit around for a while and they trade stories. And even on my first day there, people were trading stories about people they knew who had been to jail. |
2:32.0 | They'd been to jail because if you miss a couple of these court appearances, a warrant can be issued for your arrest. |
2:39.0 | A lot of debtors actually think about it as jail for medical debt, even though if you look at it and break it down, it's jail for non-appearance. |
2:47.0 | But the way they see it is like, oh, I know these people have gone to jail for medical debt. |
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