In the many stories about debt forgiveness in the US that have surfaced in recent years, I’ve never understood how it is possible to buy debt at a huge discount – a dollar for $100 of debt, for example. If it is possible to do this, why not reduce the debt for the debtor, I always wonder.

But in any case, I was thinking about this as I was reading about a nonprofit, RIP Medical Debt, which has bought $6.7 billion of debt, freeing 3.6 million people from having to repay it. That is just astounding. Almost as astounding as the statistic that 41% of American adults have medical debt.