In June 2016, television comedy host John Oliver bought nearly $15 million (£11.8 million) in unpaid medical debt for just $60,000 (£47,000) through a debt collection company created for the purpose. Instead of using debt collectors to demand payment from the roughly 9,000 patients linked to the accounts, the producers of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver transferred the entire debt portfolio to a specialist charity to have it wiped out. The television segment showed how the little-known American market for buying and selling unpaid debt works. In this market, third-party collection agencies buy unpaid consumer and medical bills for a small part of their original value.
Setting up a collection agency for $50
To carry out the…