Money Culture

One million Illinoisans opened their mail and found their medical debt gone

The letters landed in all 102 counties.

As someone with a heart condition, I find any mail with a medical-sounding return address terrifying. It ranks right up there with a letter from the IRS. But the mail a million Illinois residents just opened is the kind I could deal with.

Their medical debt is gone. As Erik Barnes reports, the Illinois Medical Debt Relief Program cleared roughly $2.6 billion in bills across all 102 counties, and nobody had to apply. No forms, no hardship interview, no proving you deserved it. If a household earned at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, or its medical bills ran past 5% of annual income, a confirmation letter simply arrived. Lieutenant Gov. Juliana Stratton put the reasoning plainly: "No one should ever delay care because of cost."

Which leaves the better question: how does a state erase billions of dollars it never had? The answer involves a nonprofit, a bulk discount, and the gap between what a hospital bill says and what it is actually worth.

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Hello GOOD readers, I’m stepping away from the keyboard for a week of vacation, so we’ll be pausing the polling while I’m out. Check back in a week for more fun polls and challenging quizzes. In the meantime, here are yesterday’s results.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday our lead story was about a town that created a lending library for sports equipment.

That got me wondering, which sort of library would GOOD readers like to see more of? The power tool library ran away with it, scoring almost 43% of votes, and I get it! My garage is filled with expensive tools I used once. It’s a tragedy.

• Sports gear, so a pickup game stays free for all (23.4%)

• Power tools, for the tile saw I need once every four years (42.9%)

• Novelty cake pans, because one birthday demanded a T-rex (10.4%)

• Musical instruments, to support the clarinet phase I feel coming (23.4%)

GOOD reader sgwc1266 voted for power tools and spoke up for people like my wife. “…so my husband won't go out and buy some obscure tool that he will only use once in his life!“

Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy

Boomers retired forward. Gen X is retiring backward.

Gen X's retirement plan involves a skateboard, a drum kit, and a van.

Benjamin Brandt has spent nearly two decades helping people plan for retirement, and he opens with the same question every time: what are you retiring to? Boomers tend to answer with a wish list of things they have never actually done. The garden they will finally have time for. Golf, three days a week. Cabinets, built in the garage.

Brandt calls that retiring forward, and he is careful to point out that it is a bet. You are wagering that the daydream you had at your desk will still feel good on a random Tuesday morning with nothing on the calendar. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the phone rings and a client admits he is already sick of golf. Gen X, as Annie Reneau reports for our sister site Upworthy, is running the play in reverse. One of Brandt's clients is getting the band back together, and not as a figure of speech. Instruments, amps, a van, a setlist. Another is getting back on a skateboard. Another is dusting off his Magic: The Gathering cards and hosting tournaments.

The split makes sense once you look at what each generation had to work from. Boomers were the first group to land a retirement that might run 20 or 30 years, and nobody handed them a playbook. Gen X got something better than a playbook. They got a case study.

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson boarded Air Force One with thirteen senators and nineteen representatives and flew to Independence, Missouri, to sign a bill he could easily have signed at his desk. The legislation created Medicare and Medicaid, and Johnson wanted to sign it in a specific room, in front of a specific person.

That person was Harry Truman. Twenty years earlier, Truman had become the first president to propose national health insurance, and Congress had killed it. He was 81 now, sitting in the auditorium of his own presidential library. Johnson handed him Medicare card number one, and handed Bess Truman number two. Truman called it a profound personal experience.

Sixty-one years later, economists still argue about whether Medicare made Americans live longer. What they do not argue about is money. The program cut out-of-pocket medical spending by roughly 40% for the households that had been hit hardest by it. It was a bill signing staged as a thank-you note, and the thank-you was the smaller part of the story.

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