This Interactive Map Showing America's Household Debt Is Worth Your Time

If you're like us, you probably have no idea exactly how many of your neighbors — or fellow Americans, for that matter — have unpaid debts. If that's the case, you should check out a fascinating new interactive map created by the good folks over at the Urban Institute. The map shows, county by county, what percentage of people have debt in collections, according to a 2016 sample of credit bureau records. As you can see in the below screenshot showing the share of people with any debt in collections, debt varies a ton state by state.

What exactly does "debt in collections" mean? The Urban Institute explains:

Debt in collections includes past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged-off on their books as well as unpaid bills reported to the credit bureaus that the creditor is attempting to collect. For example, credit card accounts enter collections status once they are 180 days past due.

[Urban Institute]

What makes the interactive particularly cool is that it also breaks down debt by the race of debtors, the median amount they owe and how much of their debt is medical debt. It also shows the inverse relationship between overall debt and income and between medical debt and health insurance coverage. (Unsurprisingly, making more money and having health insurance tend to protect people from not being able to pay their bills.)

Plus, you can zoom in to the state and even the county level to find out the specific debt-related demographics of different areas. The results paint a stark picture of the effects of different states' healthcare policy, as CityLab explains:

A previous analysis by the Urban Institute focused on medical debt, and found one reason it was so concentrated in the South was because the uninsured rates tended to be higher. While that changed to some extent with the Affordable Care Act, many Southern states chose not to expand Medicaid. On the other hand, Minnesota — which has the lowest rates of debt — has one of the most generous Medicaid programs in the country, and a more inclusive and higher-quality health care system.

[CityLab]

As you can see in the screenshot below, only 3% of Minnesotans have medical debt in collections, and only one county (rural Clearwater County) has medical debt rates over 11%. 

Compare that picture to the state of medical debt in the rest of the country. Nationwide, 18% of people have medical debt in collections, and, as CityLab noted, much of that debt is concentrated in states that chose not to expand Medicaid under the ACA.