El-Sayed claim to have already erased $700M in medical debt untrue
Todd Spangler
Detroit Free Press
June 26, 2026
In comments to the Free Press and in a TV ad for his campaign, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has claimed – or seemed to have claimed – to have eliminated $700 million in medical debt as director of Wayne County’s health department.
Neither he nor the health department has done so, according to a fact check of the records done by the Free Press and following up on an earlier report by Bridge Michigan.
El-Sayed did – as Wayne County’s health director, a position he held before leaving to run for the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat – help put in place a program to eliminate that level of debt, an effort still touted on the county’s website.
And in other comments, El-Sayed, as recently as April, has clearly said the program set aside funding “to erase upwards of $700 million” in medical debt.
As a public health official in Wayne County, I led the program to set aside $7 million to erase nearly $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 families.
It’s the biggest medical debt erasure in Michigan State history.
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) April 30, 2026
That comment is correct. But nowhere near that level of medical debt has, in fact, been erased so far.
The county website indicates that the medical debt relief effort El-Sayed led has eliminated about $57.4 million, for more than 83,000 beneficiaries. That $700 million figure is an aspiration for how much the program could eventually retire for Wayne County residents, as the Free Press has reported previously.
Read more here.
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