Given that the majority of medical debt included in your collector debt experiment was several years old (average age ~28 quarters) and likely already priced in as low-recovery debt by collectors, to what extent do your null effects on financial and health outcomes reflect the diminished salience and psychological burden of such ‘stale’ debt, rather than an inherent ineffectiveness of medical debt relief per se? Could the age of debt have muted the potential for observing causal effects, especially since patients may have already adapted their behavior or expectations around repayment long before the intervention?
Since only a small portion of treated individuals were actually reached or made aware of their debt relief, like in the hospital debt experiment where just 17% were reached by phone and 41% got voicemails, could this low awareness have dampened the observed effects? Is it possible that the psychological or behavioral benefits of debt relief, such as reduced stress or improved healthcare usage, simply didn’t materialize because many people didn’t know their debt had been canceled in the first place?