Plus, I noticed a shout out to the BYU Finance department in the paper's abstract.



There are lot of points that run counter to the policy/media talking points.
TLDR:
They eliminated medical debt for a large subset of people and the outcomes were surprising:

"Nonetheless, our results are sobering; they demonstrate no improvements in financial well-being or mental health from medical debt relief, reduced repayment of medical bills, and, if anything, a perverse worsening of mental health."

I just left a startup that helped with medical debt. Our sales rep kept saying, "medical debt is the worst type of debt you can have, it's the worst for your health. People who have medical debt are much more likely to die within 6-12 months vs. any other kind of debt."

A few quick thoughts from someone who has been in this area for a while....
1. One issue here is correlation is not causation. Of course if you are going to die of cancer or diabetes you're going to see a spike in medical debt. but it isn't the medical debt that is CAUSING you to die, you have medical debt because you were already dying already. Vs. Student loan debt, which doesn't correlate with dying early.

2. Is Medical debt really "the worst kind of debt?" I would argue the opposite. I have never gone a month without paying off my credit card balance. When I had student loans, I never missed one payment except when I was unemployed for 3 months, when I called and arranged for a special payment plan. But when the doctor's office says I have an unpaid balance of $150 because of what insurance missed, it doesn't keep me up at night. I know those numbers are made up anyway and can easily be negotiated. I also know that if I don't pay they will just keep bugging me for months and the interest never goes up, so I can pay it when I feel like it. I've also never had a mortgage or credit card or car loan impacted because of my unpaid doctors bills (the 3 major credit bureaus have stopped showing medical debt on credit reports).

3. People who had their medical debt partially forgiven and were told about it were actually MORE depressed. This phenomenon has been observed in similar studies. There are some possible explanations. This forgiveness was done for medical debt that had already been uncollected for over a year. So maybe the person had already forgotten about it and moved on with their life and this just reminded them. This was also given to low income families, so a small "cash transfer," (we paid your $1200 bill off) reminds you how much further you have to go because its a drop in the bucket. "The authors' interpretation is that recipients of the cash payments viewed the transfers as insufficient to close the gap between their resources and needs." In other words, it's better to forgive nothing than just a little bit because my life still stinks (lessons for student loan forgiveness as well?)