PHILADELPHIA, PA—A group of TJU students decided to use their unique “abilities” to complain for a good cause this past week, announcing a campaign to persuade state lawmakers to pass the bipartisan PA House Bill 79 (HB79), colloquially known as the Medical Debt Relief Act. The students, all members of the student organization JeffDET, came out in support of the bill just before committee meetings regarding the bill are set to take place in Harrisburg at the end of this month.
“We got tired of moaning about how lectures are too long or too boring or too short or too irrelevant, and about how the days are too exhausting to get through. So, we thought to ourselves: hey, what if we just turned our energy toward something else? That’s how the campaign was born,” said one member of the JeffDET board, who requested anonymity.
Another added, “We figured we should go bother people who can actually solve some problems instead of our parents and significant others, so we decided to launch the petition.”
The students’ nagging effort will culminate in a session in the Hamilton Lobby on March 20th between noon and 1 PM where TJU students with nothing better to do can grab a slice of pizza and listen to the JeffDET leadership warble about their petition and other ways to get involved in medical debt advocacy. The petition in question calls for Pennsylvania residents to sign and show their support for HB79, which, among other provisions, stands to establish a universal application for hospitals to use for financial assistance programs and mandate that hospitals provide information about how to access these programs upon patient intake and discharge. Put another way, the bills would mandate that information be given like free samples at Costco, a prize anyone would fight for.
The full text of the bill is available at https://www.palegis.us/legislation/bills/2025/hb0079. In lieu of further comment on this story, JeffDET leadership requested that those who reside in PA consider signing their petition, linked below.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSchsyu4bsz_n9Xo26jeNXZPRVY5TR8rpn7e7bzExb0jOnMzJA/viewform
The Humerus Daily 
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