Watch John Oliver forgive nearly $15 million in debt with the push of a button.
It's not quite Oprah yelling 'You get a car! You get a car!' It's better.
Just by pressing a button, John Oliver made the largest one-time giveaway in TV history — nearly $15 million.
All GIFs from "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver."
The money went to nearly 9,000 individuals, and while they won't be receiving a check or a fancy car, their lives will be getting so much easier thanks to Oliver and his team at "Last Week Tonight."
During his segment on debt buyers and collectors, Oliver focused on a specific kind of delinquency: medical bills.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2012 nearly 1 in 6 families in the U.S. has struggled paying their outstanding medical bills; 1 in 10 families weren't able to pay bills at all.
That's billions of dollars worth of debt from millions of people.
The fact that medical bills are a typically unexpected expense makes that particular form of debt ripe for a very opportunistic and surprisingly unregulated industry: debt collectors.
Here's how debt buyers and collectors work.
It starts with a debt. One of the examples Oliver used was the case of a man who was hospitalized for four days with respiratory issues, later finding out that his insurance wouldn't cover the cost. This left him with $80,000 worth of debt he had no way of paying.
If the debt goes unpaid, the hospital might sell the rights to collect on it to a third party (a debt buyer), and then they can go about trying to collect it.
The problem here is that there's very little documentation that goes along with the sold debt, making it hard to prove who owns it and whether or not it's been paid off. While there is a statute of limitations on debt collection, debt buyers bank on the fact that the average consumer doesn't know that and will continue to try to collect — some with less than friendly tactics.
Basically, it's a big, stressful, anxiety-inducing mess for the person at the center of it all.
To prove just how easy it is to get into the debt-buying business, "Last Week Tonight" started their own collection agency.
After paying $50 to start their own agency, with Oliver listed as the chairman of the board, the "Last Week Tonight" team was offered the opportunity to buy nearly $15 million in medical debt from a group in Texas. The price? A little less than $60,000.
In exchange, Oliver was given a spreadsheet with thousands of names, phone numbers, social security numbers, and debt amounts. If they wanted to, the "Last Week Tonight" agency could have set about trying to collect on the nearly $15 million.
But they didn't.
Oprah's famous car giveaway was valued at around $7 million. Oliver nearly doubled that.
And unlike Oprah's car giveaway, there won't be any adverse tax consequences for the people whose debt has just been forgiven.
So. Freakin. Cool. Right?
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
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Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.