The Fair Fight Political Action Committee (PAC), led by prominent Democrat and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has committed to help wipe out medical debt for 108,000 people in Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, according to the Associated Press. Fair Fight announced in a press release that it has donated $1.34 million to the nonprofit organization RIP Medical Debt.

“Working with RIP Medical Debt, Fair Fight is stepping in where others have refused to take action,” Abrams said. “For people of color, the working poor and middle-class families facing crushing costs, we hope to relieve the strain on desperate Americans and on hospitals struggling to remain open.”

Experts say Southerners face 30 percent higher medical debt than those who live in the North, and a 2018 U.S. Census Bureau report indicated that significantly more households in the South struggle with medical debt than in the West and Midwest.

Abrams has pointed out that Black households shoulder a particularly heavy burden, with 28 percent plagued by unpaid medical bills of some kind; she is acutely aware that concerns about high costs and potential debt often deter people from seeking much-needed healthcare.

“I know firsthand how medical costs and a broken healthcare system put families further and further in debt,” Abrams said in a statement. “Across the Sunbelt and in the South, this problem is exacerbated in states like Georgia where failed leaders have callously refused to expand Medicaid, even during a pandemic.”

New research out of Stanford shows that medical debt in America now amounts to $141 billion. In response to the staggering estimate, Fair Fight’s relief program is part of a larger initiative to advance the expansion of Medicaid nationwide.