Medical Debt and Racial Justice

Join us for a conversation between Luke Messac and Kenyon Farrow on medical debt and racial justice. This event took place on November 16, 2023. Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Debt robs. But debt also disciplines…Today, while the imperial imperatives might be different, the role of debt is the same—to compel consent through the coercion of debt.” One of the major sources of debt is medical costs. In the United States, an estimated 100 million people owe medical debt in some form. Medical debt appears on the credit reports of 43 million Americans, and medical debt collection brought in $1.5 billion in revenue for America’s 7,000 debt collection agencies. Medical debt can be debilitating, resulting in denial of care, lawsuits, seizures of bank accounts, foreclosures, property liens, wage garnishments, and arrests. While medical debt impacts people across race, gender, and class, African Americans and people with low incomes have far more medical debt than other social groups. As emergency physician and historian Luke Messac notes in his new book Your Moneyor Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, “A number of broader social forces have contributed to this transformation of medical debt. These include structural racism, economic inequality, the late-twentieth-century rise of neoliberal ideology, early twenty-first century efforts to organize health care workers, social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and shifts in health financing and ownership…third-party financing, health insurance reimbursement, social insurance, financialization, and privatization.” This event brings together Messac with Kenyon Farrow, a public health policy and communications expert, to examine how racism and resistance to a strong social welfare state have shaped changes in healthcare and medical debt, and in the process, harm society overall. They will also explore current policy and political efforts around healthcare access and debt erasure, and how confronting medical debt is a racial justice issue. Speakers Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor, and strategist, whose work has long focused on public health and infectious disease with a focus on racial, gender and economic justice. He is the Vice President of Policy with Point Source Youth, a national organization working to end youth homelessness. He is the former Managing Director of Advocacy and Organizing with PrEP4All, and also served as senior editor of TheBody.com & TheBodyPro.com and U.S. & Global Health Policy Director with Treatment Action Group (TAG). Luke Messac is an emergency physician and a historian. He is an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed residency training in emergency medicine at Brown/Rhode Island Hospital. His research focuses on the history and political economy of health care, as well as on diagnostics for emergency care in resource-limited settings. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and online outlets including Jacobin and Current Affairs. His first book, No More to Spend, is a history of medical neglect and exploitation in Malawi. His latest book, Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, will be published by Oxford University Press, in November 2023. It tells the story of how the collection of medical debt has become so aggressive, and the impact this is having on Americans’ lives. Twitter: @LukeMessac Get a copy of Dr. Messac’s new book Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978019767... Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/StTxB7D-UEQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks