A little more than a week after former Razorbill publisher Casey McIntyre died from ovarian cancer at 38, a campaign on fundraising site RIP Medical Debt that she organized before her death has raised more than $600,000 in donations—enough to wipe out more than $60 million in medical debt for cancer patients. The amount is still growing.
McIntyre’s story has been picked up by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Good Morning America, BBC News, and other major outlets. “We’re overwhelmed, and it’s been really powerful to see the response to people wanting to eliminate strangers’ medical debt,” McIntyre’s husband, Andrew Rose Gregory, told the New York Times.
RIP Medical Debt, according to its website, uses "data analytics to pinpoint the debt of those most in need: households that earn less than 4x the federal poverty level...or whose debts are 5% or more of annual income," then "buy debt in bundles, millions of dollars at a time at a fraction of the original cost," amounting to debt relief of about 100 times the amount raised by each campaign.
McIntyre's campaign, which is managed by her family, began with a $20,000 goal, which it met shortly after its launch; new goals have been set regularly over the past week, and have all been met in short order. The current goal is $499,999; as of Monday morning, $475,000 had been raised.
