A cancer doctor in the US has written off almost $650,000 of unpaid medical bills because his patients have been unable to pay because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Omar Atiq had run a cancer treatment centre in Arkansas after nearly 30 years in business.
But after working with a debt collection firm to gather outstanding payments, he realised many families had been hit hard financially by the pandemic.
He decided to write to patients over Christmas to tell them that their debts would be wiped out.
Dr Atiq told ABC’s Good Morning America: “Over time I realised that there are people who just are unable to pay.
“So my wife and I, as a family, we thought about it and looked at forgiving all the debt. We saw that we could do it and then just went ahead and did it.”
Dr Atiq, who is originally from Pakistan, founded the Arkansas Cancer Clinic in Pine Bluff in 1991, providing treatments including chemotherapy, radiation therapy and CAT scans. He is now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock.
“We thought there was not a better time to do this than during a pandemic that has decimated homes, people’s lives and businesses and all sorts of stuff,” Dr Atiq said, quoted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
He said the outstanding bills from about 200 patients totalled nearly $650,000 (£480,000).