Forum Post: Rolling Jubilee has already raised enough money to buy out almost $6 million of Americans’ medical debt

http://current.com/shows/the-young-turks/videos/rolling-jubilee-has-already-raised-enough-money-to-buy-out-almost-6-million-of-americans-medical-debt

Cenk talks to Thomas Gokey, an artist who is one of the co-founders of the Rolling Jubilee movement, an Occupy Wall Street off-shoot that raises money to buy debt and then “forgive” what people owe rather than collecting on the bills.

Gokey says, “Most people in the United States don’t realize that there’s this shadow market for debt. When banks irresponsibly lend money and create these toxic assets, the government has actually stepped in and mandated that they get them off their books. They actually get a tax write-off every time they do it — it’s a mini bailout. Those get sold on the secondary market of debt buyers and treat this part of someone’s life, a little bit of their misery, as if it were a commodity, and they trade it back and forth with each other. But the trick is that when they sell this debt to debt buyers, they sell it for pennies on the dollar, and that’s what makes this project work. For just $5,000 we can eradicate over $100,000 of medical debt.”