Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate ads claim he erased $700 million in medical debt, yet Wayne County records show the program canceled far less by the time he left office.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has built a signature campaign pitch around medical bills. His inaugural TV spot flashed a bold caption: “$700 MILLION MEDICAL DEBT ERASED.” The voice-over said he “got rid of millions of dollars of medical debt.”
The claim points back to a Wayne County health-department program he led before quitting in April 2025 to run for the Senate. A Washington Free Beacon review of FOIA records, contracts, and contractor reports found the real cancellations never approached that headline number.
By the time El-Sayed left the post, the program had wiped out $41.7 million, roughly 17 times smaller than the $700 million boast still used on the trail. Later tallies climbed, but they stayed far below the ad’s frame.
Undue Medical Debt, the New York City nonprofit hired to buy the bills at a steep discount, reported $91.7 million canceled through June 2026 for just under 100,000 Wayne County residents. The county’s own dashboard later showed $95.8 million. Bridge Michigan put the figure at $57.4 million nine days after the June 16 ad debuted. None of those totals matches the campaign’s $700 million line.
The mechanics were straightforward. Wayne County budgeted money from federal ARPA funds and a local indigent health fund, fed by airport parking fees and cigarette taxes, to purchase medical debt for lower- and middle-income residents or households crushed by bills. Undue bought the debt for cents on the dollar and canceled it.
County Executive Warren C. Evans praised the relief, saying it “gave them relief that they hoped for and greatly needed in their lives at pennies on the dollar to the county.” That part of the story is real. Residents got help. The scale did not match the politics.
Undue’s most recent quarterly figures show a cumulative $1.1 million spent to retire the $91.7 million. One second-quarter purchase alone bought a $29.2 million debt package for just under $250,000 from a single federally qualified health center in the county. The bargain was sharp. The volume stayed limited.
Major hospital systems never lined up. Undue slides described Detroit Medical Center as “Unresponsive since March 2024; many follow-up attempts; Parent org said no.” Corewell was listed as “Not interested.” Karmanos Cancer Institute, a McLaren subsidiary, drew “No response from outreach attempts.” Ascension Michigan also stayed off the roster in internal emails.
Independent Michigan journalist Kayleigh Lickliter reported in May that of the three top hospital systems in Wayne County, only Henry Ford Health took part, and agreed to sell just $17 million in debt. El-Sayed personally lobbied Corewell, internal emails show, and still failed to land them. Without the big systems, the “up to $700 million” math never had a path.
Paperwork undercuts the stump speech further. In a Nov. 1, 2023, email to colleagues, El-Sayed detailed a $7 million budget, with 89 percent coming from local indigent funds. The Wayne County Commission only ever approved $5 million. A December 2024 county release floated that “an additional $2 million could be added in the future should it be needed.” Undue’s spokesman later said that extra $2 million “was never pursued.”
The original 2024 contract projected purchases of up to $500 million in medical debt from the $5 million set-aside. El-Sayed’s campaign materials stretched the frame higher, “up to $700 million” for 300,000 Michiganders over two years. A county web page used the same dollar target for a lower resident count of 200,000. Undue’s own projection rested on “anticipated provider participation” that never fully arrived.
During the original contract period, an Undue report found the program hit just 8 percent of the ambitious dollar amount. The contract allowed one 12-month renewal, slated to wrap Dec. 31. Further extension would need a fresh County Commission mandate. County communications director Matt Allen said extension “still [has] to be determined.” Undue’s spokesman said the group had talked with the county about next steps but had “not received a formal extension or new amendment.”
On Aug. 27, El-Sayed’s successor, Kennyle Johnson, told a county hearing more health-center deals were in the works and that the county was “going to be looking to renew the contract with Undue Medical.” Republican Commissioner Terry Marecki noted, “A lot of contracts, we amend them two or three times.” None of that rewrites the totals already on the books.
"we haven't been able to get the following providers on board yet"
That was Undue president and CEO Allison Sesso on Oct. 31, 2024, emailing El-Sayed while flagging the ARPA reallocation deadline of December 2024 and suggesting it might be “prudent to discuss the size of the overall grant.” The hospitals that sat out kept sitting out.
El-Sayed left the health department in April 2025. The “Meet Abdul” page went up around the same time and still described a program that “will cancel up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 Michiganders over two years.” The June 16 TV ad locked in the harder past-tense frame: debt already “ERASED.”
A Dec. 10, 2025, campaign news release repeated nearly the same $700 million and 300,000-resident language with only weeks left in the initial contract window. On Sept. 5 he told a stump crowd the county had ranked number eight for medical debt nationwide and that officials “set aside $7 million to erase up to $700 million of medical debt in what is the largest medical debt erasure in Michigan state history.”
The “largest in Michigan history” line collides with the state’s own Undue contract. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced June 22 that Michigan had purchased over $200 million in medical debt for more than 280,000 residents under a separate $4.5 million state-funded deal launched in 2024 and running through September 2028. That state effort had already canceled more than twice Wayne County’s $91.7 million Undue total.
Cook County, Illinois, offered another comparison. It used $9 million in ARPA money through Undue to cancel more than $1 billion for nearly 800,000 residents. Wayne County’s program helped people. It did not rewrite the national or even the statewide leaderboard.
Rep. Haley Stevens, then a Democratic primary rival, posted the Bridge Michigan article on July 13 and cut to the point: “aspirational goals aren't real results.” El-Sayed answered the next day that “we've erased tens of millions of the hundreds of millions of medical debt our program is on track to erase for 300,000 Michiganders.” The “on track” hedge arrived after the ad had already declared the full sum erased.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner did not defend the gap between the $41.7 million on the books at his departure and the $700 million slogan when the Free Beacon asked. She said instead:
"Abdul is proud to have spearheaded a program that has erased tens of millions of dollars in medical debt for tens of thousands of Michigan families."
She added that as a senator he would “fight to eliminate medical debt and guarantee affordable healthcare for every single American by passing Medicare for All,” and she contrasted that with Republican opponent Mike Rogers, whom she cast as Big Pharma’s “champion.” Rogers’s campaign did not return a request for comment. A 2016 Rogers quote in the record had him describing industry donors calling him a champion they wanted to support.
Adrian Hemond, CEO of the bipartisan Michigan consultancy Grassroots Midwest, put the incentive structure in plain language.
"The El-Sayed campaign has been fairly fast and loose with the facts."
Hemond added that Rogers “hasn't been much better,” and that “Campaigns know most voters are in no position to evaluate factual claims.” That is the core problem. A caption on television travels farther than a quarterly contractor slide deck.
El-Sayed’s wider progressive lane has drawn other scrutiny on the trail, from a Dearborn fundraiser lineup that put him alongside hard-line activists to repeated fights over how he frames his own politics. The medical-debt gap fits a pattern of maximum claim, minimum documentation.
Detroit’s poverty rate sits near 35 percent. Medical debt is a real burden there and across Wayne County. Buying old bills cheaply and clearing them can help families. Stretching a few tens of millions, or even the later $90-plus million, into a $700 million triumph turns a limited local contract into a national-style credential.
His sister’s comments at a socialist conference in Chicago already complicated the candidate’s attempt to sand down his left edge for a general electorate. Overstating a county health program does the same work from another direction: it sells competence and delivery at a scale the ledgers do not support.
Undue’s spokesman said the group still “engage[s] providers and pursue[s] opportunities to maximize the County's investment” and “anticipate[s] making some additional purchases soon.” Future buys may raise the running total. They cannot rewrite the ad that already treated the ceiling as an accomplished fact, or the stump speech that called a $7 million set-aside a done deal when the commission had approved $5 million and the extra $2 million never moved.
Kamala Harris has already stumped for El-Sayed in Michigan even as some Democrats kept their distance. The medical-debt pitch is part of what national progressives are buying, a doctor-politician who says he delivered massive relief on the local level and now wants to scale the same promise through Medicare for All.
The record shows a narrower result: a real program, real cancellations measured in the tens of millions at his exit and still under $100 million deep into 2026, major hospitals missing, a commission-approved budget below the figure he still cites, and campaign creative that froze the aspirational ceiling in place long after the shortfall was obvious.
Similar gaps have trailed other pieces of his public branding, including “Jews for Abdul” advertising that mixed outreach with activist baggage. Voters can support debt relief and still demand that a Senate hopeful stop selling a $700 million victory lap on a program that never cleared that bar.
Wayne County residents who saw bills disappear got something concrete. The rest of Michigan is being asked to treat a partial local buy-up as proof that the same politician should redesign national health finance. The invoices say otherwise. When the caption reads $700 million and the books read closer to one-seventh of that, the honest move is to fix the caption, not the expectation that busy voters will never check.
