Palestine backers halt meeting where Columbus City Council later OKs medical debt relief

The Israeli-Hamas war unexpectedly became the focus of the Columbus City Council meeting Monday evening as several hundred Palestinian supporters piled into the chambers, an adjacent hallway and spilled out the front doors of City Hall — shutting down business for roughly two hours.

The disruption caused by one of the largest crowds in recent history occurred as City Council was attempting to sign off on a landmark deal with four area hospital systems to eliminate the medical debts of more than 340,000 moderate-income city residents.

The medical debt agreement was eventually approved, erasing debt totaling more than $335 million, or just under $1,000 per account on average. In return, the city will pay $500,000 toward the providers' administrative costs to resolve the outstanding medical bills — including mailing a letter to about one out of every three Columbus residents informing them their debt is gone.

"We ended up in a really great place for Columbus residents," said Council President Pro Tem Rob Dorans, who headed the effort.

But that vote didn't come before the international crisis in the Middle East took center stage at City Council.

The group of Palestinian supporters expressed anger about a statement that Council President Shannon Hardin had posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas militants attacked an Israeli music festival and Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza. At least 1,400 are dead and some 3,400 others have been injured, Israeli authorities say, with an unknown number of hostages taken.

"Acts of terror have no place in our world," Hardin wrote on the City Council's X account, adding that he stood in solidarity with Israel in "this difficult time." He said he was "praying for the victims of this unprovoked attack and for a peaceful resolution" to the longstanding conflict.

Council initially changed Monday's agenda to allow several of the group's leaders to make statements at the start of the meeting, including Connie Hammond, with Jewish Voice for Peace, who objected to Hardin saying the attack was "unprovoked."

Hammond said Hardin's statement ignored "that it was rooted in decades of oppression of the Palestinian people," and that "the government of Israel is about to commit genocide against the people of Gaza," having cut off fuel, food and water to over a million people in "collective punishment" against children. Several speakers charged Israel with ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and labeled the situation akin to apartheid.

After the statements concluded, the emotionally charged crowd wasn't ready to go home, and Hardin shut down the meeting, including two recesses, for almost two hours before resuming regular business around 7:40 p.m. An uncommonly large police presence stood by outside City Hall and in nearby rooms inside the building, but things were peaceful.

At one point, Hardin and other councilmembers approached the crowd at the back of the room and entered into a dialogue, ultimately allowing a change in protocol for further speakers to be heard.

Another complaint from the group involved an alleged social media post by a person who works on city Democrats' political campaigns, stating that Hamas had started the latest round of violence but that Israel would "finish it."

"It's unacceptable and we'll handle that," Hardin told the group about that post. "We will have that conversation."

Councilmember Shayla Favor told the group she condemns in the strongest terms the campaign staffer's statement, and that she stood by both the Palestinians and the Israelis in praying for a ceasefire and justice.

Jana Al-Akhras, a Palestinian American and Columbus attorney, told The Dispatch outside the meeting that it wasn't inappropriate for Hardin to express shock in the images of the Hamas attack, but she would have hoped that he would have followed up with equal outrage of Israeli calls for revenge by leveling Gaza with shelling.

"I don't have a problem with making a statement on what occurred on that day (Oct. 7)," Al-Akhras said, but the group still is waiting on an official statement that takes into account innocent Palestinians now under attack, "who we know all too often face the brunt of aggression after incidents like this occur."

The Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated that as of late Monday morning at least 2,778 people had died and another 9,938 had been injured in Israeli retaliatory strikes in Gaza. Those numbers are expected to climb as Israel prepares for a ground war in northern Gaza while Hezbollah in Lebanon is threatening to attack Israel from the north.

Columbus medical debt forgiven

Eventually, the room emptied as the protesters and police dispersed. The council finally took up the medical debt-relief plan that had been hammered out over the last seven months with the Central Ohio Hospital Council, which represents the Mount Carmel Health System, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Ohio Health and Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Last spring, City Council had originally proposed entering into a $2 million contract with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt. That organization, based in New York, has "purchased" more than $8.5 billion in non-performing medical debt since it was founded in 2014 by two former debt collections executives.

The local health providers asked: "Do we really need a third party to be involved in this?" Dorans said. The answer turned out to be no, and the providers set about dismissing debt themselves, targeting debtors whose incomes were between 200%-400% of the federal poverty level, or $55,500 and $111,000 for a family of four. The systems already routinely write off the debt of people who make below 200% of the poverty level.

The city's original plan would have spent four times as much of its federal COVID funds to write off $135.2 million less in debt.

"By engaging sort of locally, we were able to do more," Dorans said.

While under the new plan RIP Medical Debt would no longer actually purchase the bad debt and independently certify the amount erased, the hospitals have shared details with the city on the numbers, Dorans said.

"Where we ended up was so much more substantive," Councilmember Emmanuel Remy said. "For anybody on the street who's been impacted by medical debt, this is a big deal."

Jeff Klingler, president and CEO of the Hospital Council, couldn't say exactly what percentage of the four health systems' outstanding debt the deal erases, but estimated that "the bulk" would come from within the targeted income range. The debt was eliminated for accounts from 2015 through 2020, as debt from before 2015 would already largely have been written off, he said.

wbush@gannett.com

@ReporterBush

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: City Council halted by Palestine backers, but medical debt relief OKd