Lizzie Presser reports for ProPublica.

She lives in Brooklyn, but she spent a lot of her summer in Kansas in a little town called Coffeyville.

Coffeeville's this kind of old historic town in southeast Kansas, so right over the Oklahoma border.

The downtown is lined with these kind of gorgeous turn-of-the-century brick buildings,

but all the old department stores and restaurants and boutiques are shuttered.

Coffeeville has a poverty rate that's twice the national average. In the last few years,

Amazon has shut down a local distribution warehouse. John Deere laid off workers too.

And the largest employer is an oil refinery and the second largest employer is the hospital.

The hospital is what brought Lizzie here.

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.

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?

Yeah.

So when I went the last Tuesday of July, so 90 people had been summoned.

And this is a town of 9,000.

Only about 35 showed up.

And many of the debtors are sick and you can see it. They're in their

pajamas. They are wearing eye patches or bandages. They are 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.

He had just had a heart attack, and he was called into court.

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.

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