New York City will purchase millions of dollars of medical debt and then erase it in effort to help as many as 500,000 residents, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Monday.

The program involves partnering with a nonprofit organization, RIP Medical Debt, that buys unpaid medical debt from hospitals at a steep discount and then clears it. The city will invest $18 million to relieve more than $2 billion in medical debt for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, Adams said.

Affected New Yorkers will be notified that their medical debt has been relieved, as there is no application process for the one-time debt relief program, which will launch early this year and run for three years.

“No one chooses to go into medical debt — if you’re sick or injured, you need to seek care. But no New Yorker should have to choose between paying rent or for other essentials and paying off their medical debt,” Adams said in a statement.

The program is aimed at New Yorkers whose unpaid medical bills are at least 5% of their annual household income or those in households with an income under four times the federal poverty line, which is $31,200 for a family of four.

Medical debt is the single-largest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and disproportionately affects low-income Americans and those without health insurance or who are underinsured.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul in December signed legislation that bars health care professionals and ambulances from reporting medical debt to credit agencies.

A New York charity started in 2014, RIP Medical has abolished more than $10.4 billion in medical debt for more than 7 million people since its inception, according to its website.

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FOR TV, MOVIES, MUSIC VIDEOS AND ANIME – VIKI IS THE GAME CHANGER AND ENTERTAINMENT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!

MARLEE MATLIN, award winning actress and advocate for the hearing impaired unveils a new technology from VIKI.com that will expand the audiences for TV, movies, music , video and anime to ALL audiences—hearing impaired or not, in the language of their choice.

IMAGINE what is beginning to happen – Mexican TeleNovelas are wildly popular in Mexico and among Hispanics in the USA. But with Viki, the series can be seen around the world in 150 languages. And conversely in Mexico, TV programs from all over the world can be seen there with closed captioning done by volunteers via crowdsourcing.

Anime was one of the early recipients of Viki technology and crowdsourcing. Now kids around the world can watch their heroes and villains with the Far Eastern art and beauty in their native language.

And imagine your news show playing around the world in the closed captioning language of the viewer’s choice.

The World of Entertainment just got smaller!

Marlee is working on Viki’s campaign to improve accuracy in closed captioning and increase accessibility in ALL languages for TV shows and movies streamed online.

•  Marlee will talk about a new online petition on Change.org calling for improvement in translating captions and for providing access to viewers in multiple languages.
•   Marlee introduces technology that will change all of our lives
•  Marlee can discuss how crowdsourcing an integral part of the Viki model, opens up a worldwide market for small business

Viki.com is a free video streaming website that offers tens of thousands of on demand movies, TV shows music and music videos from all over the world. Much like WIKI-pedia or Hulu, it depends on volunteers to submit content, and translate and subtitle shows in over 200 languages. It can also be accessed on smart phones.

Marlee Matlin is an actress and the only hearing impaired performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (“Children of a Lesser God”). She won a Golden Globe award with two additional nominations, and four Emmy nominations. Deaf since she was 18 months old, Marlee  is also a prominent member of the National Association of the Deaf. She currently plays the recurring character Melody Bledsoe on the ABC Family television teen/family drama series Switched at Birth.

The post MARLEE MATLIN ANNOUNCES BILLION WORD MARCH TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA TAKING CLOSED CAPTIONING INTO THE DIGITAL AGE appeared first on Good News!.