wow.

Pretty cool of them to forgive 15m in debt.

9,000 lives made better in a push of a button.

A great humanitarian deed indeed.

This is possibly the singly most cool thing Oliver has ever done.

I hope someone with a lot more money than sense -for example those online gambling places that buy stupid shit on eBay for ridiculous sums just for advertising- starts buying this debt up and forgiving it.

...actually, after thinking about it, Oliver has just forced the federal government to bail out those debtors. Their debt is now shared between all Americans.

Um, I don't think so.

The credit card companies or the hospitals or whoever the original lenders were had already sold the debt at pennies on the dollar, long before it was resold to Oliver. They had already taken the loss and no debt collection company was going to change the amount of their actual losses. The debt collection agency pockets the profit -- the difference between what they paid for it and what they actually collected.

The only thing the government isn't getting is income tax on the forgiven debt. (If your debt is forgiven, that is taxable income in a lot of cases.)

Nice. For some reason, HBO cut the last 5 minutes off the program....really, it went over, but didn't record the end....which arguably was the best part.
I wonder if he just erased my medical debt....how do I find out?

Holy crap, even at 0.0049% ("less than half a cent on the dollar"), that's still over $70k!

Good on the LWT team.

He does mention it's around $60,000 at one point.

Ok, must have missed that part, thanks.

For all those blocked, just search these titles on Daily Motion and you should find some one who's uploaded them.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4eoyvj_last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver-debt-buyers-hbo_tv

Me too, but I knew it would be a pretty penny even at a dollars to the penny ratio.

I just realized, he just unintentionally told us ALL how to do this for ourselves....if you have debt, simply start a company that buys debt (you can start one for almost nothing in many areas), buy your own debt at $.005 per $1 of debt and write it off as a business loss, then close the doors....debt gone! Thanks John, that could actually work! Brilliant. EDIT: Maybe I should start a service that allows people to do just that for 1% of the final cost....so if they buy their $20000 debt for $100, I make $1. Hmmmmm...my idea, nos scopies mees.

Can you buy your own debt?

On one hand, that seems like it would be against the rules somehow.

On the other hand, after watching this video, nothing would surprise me about this industry.

If it works, it's freakin' genius.

Many debtees will settle on a portion of your debt if they believe the rest is unlikely to be recoverable, which is functionally the same thing as buying your debt on a discount.

Individually negotiating with each of the debtors is generally more expensive for the debtees than simply selling off the debt in bulk to collection agencies, even if avoids the cut that these agencies take for their services.

There are debt remediation companies dedicated to this although these are generally unnecessary as you can just do it yourself and in countries like Australia (probably NZ too) there are free government advice services for this kind of thing.

Even if you could buy your own debt it may not save you. Like they said earlier, their record keeping is notoriously bad, someone could still come after you for debt you don't actually owe anymore. You could probably send them packing with enough time and effort but but it might wind up costing you anyhow.
Wonderful system we have here, I could fix it, with a few nukes.

Occupy has been doing it with mortgages for years.

BATTER

My bad.
thanks