He Helped Erase $1.2 Million in Medical Debt for Cuyahoga County Residents. It Took Him Just Two Months

Ethan Khorana has encountered a lot of questions in his six years of community organizing. Why potholes go so long unfixed. Why overfilled dumpsters go so long without cleanup. Or public park grills go filthy. Many times, the answers aren’t all that complicated. Many times, you can just do things.

Khorana, a 20-year-old college student from Shaker Heights, encountered another one this summer when he was schooled in the realm of unpaid medical bills. With the right planning, he found, millions of dollars of his neighbors’ medical debt could be relieved for the price of a used sedan. All by making a few calls.

So, Khorana did just that. In partnership with Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit based in New York City, he raised a little over $10,000 from a short list of donors and, starting Thursday, helped buy up and cancel out $1.3 million in medical debt for 1,148 Cuyahoga County residents.

It took Khorana two months of work. Half of his summer break as a sophomore public policy major at Duke University.

“What surprised me most was the fact that I had to be the person doing it,” Khorana told Scene, sitting at a table in Shaker’s Van Aken District. “You know, $10,000 for most government budgets is like a rounding error, to some extent.”

“But that’s fundamentally changing people’s lives and the way they’re able to move forward from a bill,” he said.

About 10 percent of Cuyahoga County’s 1.2 million residents had some sort of medical debt in 2022, a dashboard published by the Urban Institute showed, with a median amount of $440. But that’s just debt run by collections agencies, not on one’s credit card or managed by the hospital or clinic.

Hospital systems often sell debt in bulk, typically at a discount, on secondary markets. Companies like Undue, the liaison for Khorana’s campaign in Shaker, buy these debt packages with tremendous purchasing power. On average, every $1 raised equals $100 in medical debt cancelled, Undue said.

Which means Khorana scored a bit of a deal.

“This shows what’s possible when a community decides to come together and do something,” Marisa Clemente, Undue’s vice president of philanthropy, wrote Scene in an email. “We’re honored to have been part of it.”

Last spring, Cleveland City Council allocated $2 million of American Rescue Plan Act dollars to help erase $165 million of combined medical debt for 161,000 Clevelanders. Ward 4 Councilman Kris Harsh spearheaded the campaign after he, like Khorana, discovered erasing medical bills with Undue as buyer was easier done than thought.

But Khorana is no salaried politician. And his main project, a Better Future for Cuyahoga, is no council body.

That’s sort of Khorana’s point. After attending his first rally, a Black Lives Matter protest at 14, he aligned himself with a bevy of traditionally leftist issues—getting Shaker Heights police paired up with mental health co-responders (for which Khorana helped raised $20,000), or pushing Shaker Heights Mayor David Weiss to cancel the city’s controversial contract with Flock Safety. He helped Mayor Bibb transition to office in 2023.

If Khorana has a modus operandi, it is to show how everyday neighbors can latch onto good public policy without trudging through the long, laborious process of bureaucracy.

“We all want potholes filled, want to be able to get to work, to put food on the table for one’s family,” Khorana said.

“And I think that’s what I’ve been trying to preach as I went around the county,” he said, “is that we really all rise and fall together.”

After Khorana finishes his degree at Duke, he said he plans to return to Cleveland in 2028 to hit the ground running with his data-driven policy ideas.

And maybe cancel other types of debt. Credit card? Student loans? Mortgages?

“I’d love to,” Khorana said, laughing. “It’s actually a good idea. Maybe I’ll look into it.”