So you occasionally see a post on social media of some billionaire that visited a hospital and has paid off a bunch of debt for patients they visited as a show of "Good will" and "Look at me, I'm being a Samaritan"

Generally with phrases like "The hospital is holding $10,000,000 of medical debt and I've paid it in full!"

But why do it this way? Why not purchase the debt at pennies on the dollar from collections companies, and then forgive that debt?

Seems like paying $10,000,000 of debt at market rates wouldn't go as far as spending that $10,000,000 on debt that's been valued at say $0.10/$1 which would allow you to essentially do the same, but get a $100,000,000 impact from that same $10,000,000 that you paid in full at one hospital.

I mean, if you were being genuinely a Samaritan in this case, seems like finding the cheapest way to forgive the most debt would be the better ROI than visiting a hospital and just paying the bills on file at full value?

Now I know that we have medical debt in Australia, but not on the same scale as some countries like the USA, and our billionaires (like Twiggy Forrest) also do things like this to help people in need.

But it seems wouldn't these businessmen get a better return on that money by shrewdly investing it into the debt purchase side of the house for bad debts, rather than paying it off dollar for dollar to the active debts?