Medical Financial Hardship

The Urban Institute published an article documenting the disproportionately low credit scores found in areas of the American South and connected those low scores, at least in part, to medical debt. Fully 92 of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt are in the South, with the other two in Oklahoma and Missouri. The CFPB reported that medical debt can “adversely impact people’s financial, physical and mental health.” Regions Bank’s retail footprint aligns with this hardship map. In 2021, we began developing a plan to address this overwhelming problem in our communities. Working with our financial education partner, EverFi, in 2022 we created four online learning modules available on the EverFi platform via Regions.com: Negotiating Your Medical Bill, Managing Out-of-Pocket Healthcare Costs, Obtaining Debt Relief for Medical Debt, and Preventing Bankruptcy. For nine months the information was available only through Regions.com but was then made available to anyone in the EverFi network.

In tandem with the development of the modules, our team sought a nonprofit community partner with the expertise and experience to address medical debt directly. That partner was RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit that buys medical debt at a steep discount and uses donations to relieve about one hundred times its value in medical debt.Recipients receive letters that their debt has been erased with no consequences or penalties. Regions Bank funding has resulted in more than $18 million in medical debt relief to almost 18,000 people. https://doingmoretoday.com/regions-next-step-survey-finds-many-americans-arent-prepared-for-medical-expenses/

https://doingmoretoday.com/regions-bank-helps-families-alleviate-medical-debt/

https://doingmoretoday.com/regions-bank-committed-to-reducing-medical-debt/