A FRESH START SHOULD NOT REQUIRE A MIRACLE.

JUSTICE · ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Published by Langhorne P. Breedlove

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026 · 12:24 AM ET

Reading time: 9 minutes

Tags: Debt Relief · Medical Debt · Student Loans · Jubilee · Economic Security

Dear fellow American proletariat: America can forgive a great many things. It can forgive a failed venture, restructure a corporate balance sheet, and write a tax provision so elaborate that accountants may someday require their own accountants. But tell a patient that a disputed medical invoice should not follow her for a decade, and suddenly we are asked whether she has considered personal responsibility.

American Proletariat proposes a modern Biblical Jubilee: a carefully legislated program for releasing qualifying medical debt and public-education debt, repairing the consequences of collections, and preventing the same debts from immediately returning. The name is historical; the mechanism must be constitutional, secular, administrable, and paid for honestly. No one is proposing that a federal agency acquire a ram's horn and call the Treasury Department when it sounds.

THE MANDATE

AP's aim is to extinguish specified medical and public-education obligations and give affected borrowers a practical financial reset. Medical obligations would require rules for verification, contested bills, hospital financial assistance, accounts sold to collectors, judgments and credit reporting. Education relief would require separate rules for federally held student loans, federally guaranteed or privately held loans, and other qualifying public-education debts. The precise eligible populations and dollar limits remain questions for legislation, not details we are entitled to invent.

A genuine Jubilee must also confront the mechanism that created the debts. AP's proposed universal comprehensive healthcare and publicly financed education would aim to reduce future medical and education borrowing, but neither is currently enacted nationwide. Debt release without reforming prices, insurance gaps, tuition financing, and institutional billing would resemble mopping the floor while a pipe continues to burst.

ROOTS · THE FIFTIETH YEAR WAS NOT THE SEVENTH

In Leviticus 25, the Jubilee follows seven cycles of seven years. The fiftieth year is associated with proclaiming liberty, returning ancestral land, releasing certain dependent workers, and resting agricultural land (Source 01). The same chapter reflects the ancient society's unequal treatment of people inside and outside its kinship boundaries, including provisions permitting forms of slavery. That contradiction cannot be erased by selecting only the uplifting verses.

Deuteronomy 15, by contrast, describes a remission of debts at the end of each seven-year period and assistance to people in need (Source 02). Scholars and religious interpreters have debated how particular debt-remission instructions functioned historically. The modern shorthand of 'Biblical Jubilee' blends traditions that should be distinguished if we claim to care about the history.

No ancient Israelite command is an American statute. Nor do we require a voter to accept any religion before supporting relief from unpayable obligations. AP borrows a public moral question from the tradition: must debts remain permanent when their enforcement destroys a person's capacity to participate in society?

TODAY · A DEBT CAN OUTLIVE THE SERVICE

MEDICAL BILLS

In a nationally representative 2022 KFF survey, approximately four in ten adults reported some debt attributable to medical or dental bills, a broad measure that included informal borrowing and balances paid through credit cards or payment arrangements (Source 03). It was not a count of all unpaid hospital invoices, and it should not be treated as a verified 2026 prevalence estimate.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule in January 2025 intended to remove medical debt from credit reports and restrict creditors' use of the information; a federal district court vacated that rule on July 11, 2025 (Source 04). That history demonstrates why debt cancellation, credit-reporting requirements, and federal rulemaking authority cannot be confused. Deleting a tradeline is not the same thing as extinguishing the underlying balance; cancellation is not accomplished by wishing away a credit-report entry.

PUBLIC EDUCATION LOANS

Federal Student Aid reported on September 22, 2026 that, as of June 30, 2026, the outstanding federal student-loan portfolio covered 42.3 million recipients and exceeded $1.7 trillion; more than 9.3 million recipients had loans in default within the federally managed portfolio (Source 05). These figures describe different measures and portfolios; they should not be treated as unique accounts suitable for automatic cancellation or as the program's budget cost.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness already provides qualifying borrowers with a route to discharge after 120 qualifying monthly payments and other program conditions (Source 06). That existing mechanism shows that federal law can authorize discharge in defined circumstances, but does not mean every outstanding loan is already legally eligible for unconditional forgiveness.

WHO GETS A FRESH START?

A first-stage framework should distinguish federal loans from private claims, original medical providers from debt buyers, and legitimately documented charges from fraudulent or inaccurate bills. Policymakers must decide whether relief is universal within categories or limited by income, original principal, age of debt, hardship, or type of educational institution. A patient should never be punished for having paid the same bill before a cutoff, yet prospective relief and refund rules carry substantial costs that must be debated openly.

A medical debt registry or claims-validation process could identify qualifying obligations, prevent duplicate payments, and provide an appeal channel for borrowers and providers. Medical privacy protections must be strict: verifying an amount owed does not require broadcasting diagnoses to tax agencies, employers, or politically curious neighbors.

Education relief must identify the lawful owner of each loan, the financing source, and whether any extinguishment would generate a taxable event under then-applicable law. Private creditors, credit unions, retirement funds and investors may hold financial claims whose cancellation has distinct legal and budget consequences. A government purchasing a claim at a negotiated price is different from Congress compelling a private lender to surrender it without compensation.

THE LEGAL PATH

Congress could design a program with eligibility, appropriations, loan modifications, credit-reporting duties and targeted purchase authorities, subject to constitutional limits. Executive agencies would administer powers Congress actually provides. In Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court held on June 30, 2023 that the HEROES Act did not authorize the student-loan cancellation plan at issue (Source 07). It did not decide that Congress is categorically powerless to enact expressly authorized debt relief.

Any statute should distinguish outright discharge of federal claims, grants or negotiated settlements for private medical debt, purchases of eligible private education obligations, and future-cost prevention. It must address notice, borrower consent where necessary, disputes, protection against erroneous balances, judicial review, and how state consumer-protection laws interact with the federal plan.

THE PLAN · RELEASE AND REPAIR

PHASE ONE · FIND THE DEBTS

Create an auditable inventory by loan ownership, debt type, age, outstanding principal, accrued interest, legal status and demographics where lawfully measured. Start with federal education records and voluntary or legally authorized medical-claims submissions. Prioritize correcting false invoices and servicing errors before taxpayers pay anyone for a debt that never should have existed.

PHASE TWO · CANCEL OR SETTLE

After explicit congressional authorization, discharge eligible government-held obligations and negotiate qualified medical claims or private-loan settlements under transparent procurement and valuation rules. Notice should explain exactly what is forgiven, what remains, and how a person contests a mistake. Collection agencies must be prevented from reselling or reasserting an extinguished claim.

PHASE THREE · STOP THE REPEAT

Coordinate cancellation with reforms to medical billing, care access, public education finance, student-loan servicing and consumer protection. Monitor whether households return to debt after the first release. An effective Jubilee reduces the pipeline of new obligations; a one-off celebration cannot substitute for a working system.

THE TEN-YEAR LEDGER

The ten-year fiscal model must include year-one cash effects and separately calculate the present-value budget treatment of federal loan modifications, any negotiated purchases of private claims, staffing and technology, verification and appeals, expected recoveries, tax changes, and financing. The Congressional Budget Office explains that federal loan programs are scored under the Federal Credit Reform Act and can also be examined using a fair-value approach; the same nominal loan balance need not equal the same budgetary cost (Source 08).

As an illustration of why the distinction matters, wiping away a $10,000 obligation expected to recover only a small fraction is not fiscally identical to canceling a fully performing $10,000 claim. Buying an overdue medical bill from a collector at a discount is not the same as reimbursing a hospital at face value. A responsible model must define the transaction and counterfactual cash flows before claiming a saving.

No defensible total ten-year fiscal forecast can be stated until AP specifies eligibility, relief thresholds, portfolio characteristics, take-up, negotiated prices, and the treatment of private claims. Budget estimates should show enacted-law baseline, gross discharge amounts, federal subsidy reestimates, private-purchase appropriations, administration, uncertainties and possible offsets without treating speculative economic gains as cash already collected.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Relief could be uneven across borrowers who repaid recently and those still indebted. Broad cancellation could encourage future lenders or schools to raise prices if safeguards are absent. Poorly designed purchases could reward debt buyers who acquired claims cheaply. Providers could underinvest in billing corrections if they expect government to absorb every disputed invoice. Some taxpayers may regard relief as unfair to people who avoided borrowing or who met repayment obligations.

Those objections should be tested against concrete alternatives: targeted hardship relief, automatic discharge for invalid debts, caps on interest and collection fees, stronger charity-care enforcement, publicly financed education, and direct aid to future students and patients. A defensible Jubilee needs published eligibility, anti-fraud rules, appeal rights, independent audit and transparent evaluation rather than the cheerful assumption that good intentions eliminate tradeoffs.

MEASURING SUCCESS

Measure validated debt extinguished, federal budget cost, private-claim purchase prices, reduction in collection actions, corrected credit records, borrower financial stability, appeals resolved, and new medical or education debt incurred in later years. Report results by debt type and geography, with strict confidentiality. Evaluate whether relief changes household resilience compared with similar eligible and ineligible populations; do not confuse a large headline number with durable improvement.

A RESET IS NOT A FREE PASS FOR THE SYSTEM.

The Biblical Jubilee is not a promise that every bill vanishes because someone found a memorable phrase in an ancient book. It is a proposal to examine when public policy should stop enforcing obligations that have become obstacles to health, education and participation in civic life—and to determine how relief can be financed without exporting the damage to someone else.

The question is not whether creditors have rights, whether borrowers have responsibilities, or whether public money deserves careful accounting. All three are true. The question is whether a wealthy democracy can design a lawful and transparent fresh start without immediately manufacturing the same trap again. If we can build systems that compound interest, we can at least investigate systems that compound opportunity.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

01 · United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Leviticus 25, The Jubilee Year, biblical text and notes. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/leviticus/25

02 · United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Deuteronomy 15, Debts and the Poor, biblical text and notes. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/deuteronomy/15

03 · KFF — Diagnosis: Debt national medical-debt survey, June 16, 2022. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/kffs-kaiser-health-news-and-npr-launch-diagnosis-debt-a-yearlong-reporting-partnership-exploring-the-scale-impact-and-causes-of-the-health-care-debt-crisis-in-america/

04 · Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Medical Information Final Rule; 2025 court vacatur notice. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/final-rules/prohibition-on-creditors-and-consumer-reporting-agencies-concerning-medical-information-regulation-v/

05 · Federal Student Aid, U.S. Department of Education — Federal Student Aid Data Center quarterly update, September 22, 2026. https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2026-09-22/federal-student-aid-posts-updated-reports-fsa-data-center

06 · Federal Student Aid — How to Manage Your Public Service Loan Forgiveness Progress; 120 payments and discharge. https://studentaid.gov/articles/manage-your-pslf-progress/

07 · Supreme Court of the United States — Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U.S. 477 (2023), June 30, 2023. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf

08 · Congressional Budget Office — Estimates of the Cost of Federal Credit Programs in 2027, July 22, 2026. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62265

10 RECOMMENDED ARTICLES, ESSAYS & POLICIES

→ Explore Biblical Jubilee: An End to Medical & Public Education Debt

→ Explore Biblical Jubilee: the fiftieth-year release & modern debt restoration

→ Explore Why Should Working People Pay Income Tax While Giant Companies Keep the Profits?

→ Explore Public Banking & Postal Financial Services

→ Explore Ten-Year Fiscal Accountability

→ Explore Greenbacks

→ Explore Bourbons

→ Explore Reformers, Abolitionists & Civil Rights

→ Explore Elite & Industrial Power

→ Explore Outlaws, Pirates & Folklore

WE ARE ONE.  ·  E PLURIBUS UNUM.