This is the Tom Hartman program.

So Connecticut becomes the first state to wipe out medical debts for residents.

One billion dollars in unpaid bills. Governor Ned Lamotte

announced the plan on Good Morning America today. Unvealed a plan to partner

with nonprofit organizations that buy medical debt and eliminated it reduced cost.

The way this works is hospitals and doctors offices,

if they've got unpaid debt, they know that the odds of them ever

getting anything for that unpaid debt are fairly

slim. But they'll take something rather than nothing and so what they'll do is

they'll sell that debt for a small percentage of what it's actually worth.

So say you owe $10,000 to the hospital,

the hospital will sell that debt to a debt collector

for $1,000 or for $300 or for $1,500, on what they think the odds of anything being collected

are.

And then the debt collector, they now own your debt and they go into Hyper Drive and try to

harass you and get the most out of you that you can.

So what these nonprofits are doing is they're going to the hospitals and the doctors and

saying, you know, instead of selling that $10,000 debt for a thousand bucks to a debt collector, sell it for

a thousand bucks to us.

And we'll raise money from people and we'll take that $ dollar debt which actually represents a ten thousand

dollar debt and we'll pay off that thousand dollars to the hospital and they'll wipe that debt

out and so your ten thousand dollar debt simply goes away and when it's done by the state as Connecticut is doing their

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