Debt forgiveness doesn't fix broken system Minal Patel

Op-ed contributor

A single ambulance ride. That's all it might take for a Michigan family to fall into debt they can't shake — thousands of dollars from one night in the emergency room, owed to a hospital they thought would help.

Last week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a new initiative to forgive that kind of debt: $144 million in medical bills will be erased for more than 200,000 Michiganders. This is meaningful relief. But let’s be honest—while medical debt forgiveness helps, it doesn’t fix the broken system that created the debt in the first place.

As a professor and researcher who has studied financial burden and medical debt, I’ve spent years examining who carries these burdens, how it affects people, and what actually works to prevent it. And here's what we know: debt relief