DAVIESS COUNTY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Nearly 3,000 local families across seven counties in the Wabash Valley will have their medical debt and credit cleared thanks to the efforts of a local church.
Odon Christian Church has entered into a program for the second time with a not-for-profit organization that focuses on erasing medical debt. RIPMedicalDebt offers partnerships in which interested parties can apply for a fundraising campaign to raise enough money for the organization to then take the raised funds and put it towards erasing medical debt for an area.
“So here’s how it works, for every dollar that we give, the company we partner with vows to cancel $100 of medical debt,” Micah Stephen, Lead Minister of Odon Christan Church explained. “And so basically the people at RIP that we partner with, some of them are former debt collectors, and so now they’re on the other side of the ball. They’re able to go in and offer a lump sum. So for every dollar that we raise, a hundred dollars of medical debt was canceled.”
While this is not the first time that Odon Christian Church participated in this program, the second time working with RIPMedicalDebt, Stephen noted that the church was able to double the amount of debt canceled. Stephen also said this time the organization was able to go above the promised $100 per $1 amount in canceling more than 4 million in debt.
“So we heard about this program a few years ago and went through a campaign with them five years ago and we paid off maybe 2.1 million five years ago, and we were like, ‘Wow this is almost too good to be true,’” Stephen explained. “We decided back in October, me and our staff and our leadership decided, ‘Hey, let’s do this again and see if we can blow it out of the water.’ And so this time we were able to almost double what we did five years ago in medical debt. So within the last five years, we’ve paid off 6.2 million or something like that.”
Stephen noted that while his personal experiences with family medical payments helped to spur the second campaign, he is happy to be able to help so many people.
“My dad got cancer last year. I saw this is what things cost and it’s ridiculous what people are going through. It really just prompted me to be like, ‘There are a lot of people who are really struggling right now, and if we can make a difference in their life, or take a burden off their plate, and they can realize what God has done for us, we wanna do the same type of things for others where we can take away their debt.’”
During this campaign, in total, Odon Christian Church was able to raise $21,539 which amounted to 4.1 million dollars of canceled medical debt. Stephen also described how proud he was of the church’s efforts to raise the funds as a certain amount must be reached in order to impact a specific area.
“We had a bottom dollar we had to reach in order to specifically hit the counties around us which is what we were intentionally trying to do, otherwise, they just send it to places around the United States that need it,” Stephen explained. “I was so proud of our church because they put their money where their mouth was and they raised all of it. These people just gave towards this because they wanted to help other people,” he added.
The families that have been impacted by the program should receive a letter in the mail alerting them of their debt cancelations. Stephen also noted that while many people in the Wabash Valley may have medical debt, those who have medical debt and fall below the poverty line will be more likely to see their debt canceled.
The counties that were impacted by this campaign and the funding details are as follows:
- Daviess County
- Dubois County
- Greene County
- Knox County
- Lawrence County
- Martin County
- Orange County
When asked if the church plans to continue participating in the RIPMedicalDebt program in the future, Stephen commented on the love he feels toward his community.
“We just want to love on people,” Stephen said. “A lot of these people we don’t even know and will probably never see but we just wanted to be a blessing because God has blessed us. It’s a way we can love on our community and help others. I’m always for helping people and loving on them. If we can do that, then yeah, I can see us doing that in the future, but if there’s another way we can be more effective, we’ll hit that too. We wish we could help everybody. I know there’s a lot of people that are hurting. We couldn’t help everyone, but we know we could help someone.”
