After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire) which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, and was succeeded by John Major, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax") was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners' strike. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid recession and rising unemployment. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. ![]() In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become Leader of the Opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970–1974 government. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist before becoming a barrister. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the " Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies that became known as Thatcherism. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. But that’s barely a dent in the total number of people facing tough money choices.Ī 2021 study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association determined that Americans have $140 billion in unpaid health care bills at collection agencies alone, and that debt disproportionately affects the poor.Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC ( née Roberts 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013), was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. Since its founding, RIP Medical Debt has raised enough money to eliminate more than $8.5 billion of debt for nearly 5.5 million people. The survey of 1,500 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. According to a recent survey by Tulchin Research, more than 70% of Americans support medical debt relief, while only about half of Americans support student loan debt relief. Unlike federal student loan debt relief, medical debt relief has more widespread and bipartisan support. ![]() ![]() People whose debt continues to be held by for-profit collection agencies may miss out. RIP Medical Debt determines eligibility, and the beneficiaries get a letter informing them that their debt has been acquired and canceled. Democratic Connecticut governor Ned Lamont last week proposed spending $20 million in ARPA funds to eliminate as much as $2 billion in state residents’ medical debts. As many 5,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents could benefit.Ĭook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, and Pittsburgh, New Orleans and Toledo, Ohio, are among more than a dozen communities that have set into motion or are considering similar plans. The City Council in the Boston suburb of Somerville last month unanimously passed a resolution to spend $200,000 of the city’s $77 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding that could clear as much as $4.3 million in medical debt, said Willie Burnley Jr., one of the city councilors behind the effort. To address the problem, an increasing number of municipal, county and state governments are devising plans to spend federal coronavirus pandemic relief funds to eliminate residents’ medical debt and ease those debt burdens. Some may even skip necessary health care for fear of sinking deeper into debt. (AP) - Millions of Americans mired in medical debt face difficult financial decisions every day - pay the debt or pay for rent, utilities and groceries.
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