Medical debt affects nearly 1 in 12 adults in the U.S., and Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to relieve Americans of this burden and cancel it altogether.

Recent research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows Americans owe around $220 billion in medical debt. As for Harris’ plan, the details haven’t quite been fleshed out, according to a news release from the White House, and it would require cooperation with states and Congress.

But Harris isn’t the only one trying to do this. North Carolina recently struck a deal under which hospitals will erase $4 billion in debt as part of a Medicaid expansion plan. California also implemented new protections for people with medical debt.

The big question is: Will eliminating this debt actually solve the problem, or is it just treating the symptoms?

Experts from Princeton say that even though it might help people in the short term, it’s not a long-term solution, and that medical debt will just continue to build up. The real issue is health care prices, but fixing that would require a politically divided government to agree on a complex situation. In the meantime, states are focused on more micro-level approaches to aid this problem, such as preventing medical debt from appearing on credit reports or requiring hospitals to offer better financial help to low-income patients.

Health care costs per person in the U.S. were around $12,000 in 2022, which was over $4,000 more than in any other high-income nation, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The average amount spent on health per person in comparable countries is around $6,000, so about half of what the U.S. spends per person.

Experts from Harvard say there is a long list of factors that go into the high costs. These include “wasteful systems, rising drug costs, medical professional salaries, profit-driven healthcare centers, and health-related pricing.” For example, the most expensive part of U.S. medical spending is the cost of health care administration. According to David Cutler, a professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health:

About one-third of health care dollars spent in the United States go for administration; Canada spends a small fraction as much. Whole occupations exist in U.S. medical care that are found nowhere else in the world, from medical-record coding to claim-submission specialists.

According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, U.S. insurers and providers spent $812 billion on administration, amounting to $2,497 per capita, which adds up to 34.2% of our entire national health expenditures.

As far as the U.S. health care system’s performance, according to Harvard research, America has the most technologically sophisticated medical system in the world, which is why it’s so costly. But despite the better technology, America’s health outcomes aren’t necessarily always better than those of other developed countries. The U.S. actually performs worse in areas such as life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes and safety during childbirth, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.