What cancelling medical debt does, and what it doesn't.

What the best study found

The strongest evidence so far comes from two randomized experiments by the economists Kluender, Mahoney, Wong and Yin, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025. Working with a charity that buys medical debt, they chose at random whose debt was cancelled and compared those people with similar people whose debt was not Source 11.

Here is what they found, on average:

• Credit reports: no average effect, except where the debt would otherwise have been reported to the credit bureaus.
• Other medical bills: people whose debt was cancelled paid less on the medical bills they still had.
• Health and money: no effect on survey measures of mental or physical health, use of health care or financial well-being.

These are averages across many people. They do not tell you what happened to any one person, and they come from one study with debt bought in particular years.

We cite only results we have checked against the paper. Other results will be added here, with their sources, once we have checked them.

What cancelling a debt does do

Cancelling a medical debt ends the obligation to pay that debt, and collection on it stops. The exact legal effect will be confirmed by counsel before we describe our own letters.

What it does not do

• It does not touch other debts the person may still owe.
• It does not, on average, change health or financial well-being, according to the study above.
• It cannot be requested for a specific bill, because debt is bought in large groups.

How this shapes what we say

Because of this evidence, we describe what relief does, not what we hope it does:

• We say “this debt is cancelled.” We never say a person is free of debt.
• We do not claim that relief changes anyone's health, credit or finances.
• If a person who received relief shares their own experience, with consent, we present it as their experience, not as a measured result.

How we will report our own results

We have not bought any debt yet. Every cancellation will be posted on our impact page: the date, the debt we cancelled, the people it reached and a region that cannot point to anyone. If we ever measure what happened afterwards, we will publish the method and the results, whatever they show. Mistakes go in our corrections log.