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  • The flip side of this debate is that by banning all medical debt from credit reports, patients will have no incentive to pay their medical bills and instead just skip them entirely, forcing hospitals to demand payment up front, raise prices even further, etc.

    What do I say to that? Fuck 'em.

    First, stop jacking up the prices of mundane items. Asprin shouldn't be costing me $20+ per pill just to cure a headache. That doctor that stopped in for 3 seconds to ask how I was doing shouldn't run me $2500.

    Second, make sure bills are (a) accurate, and (b) easy to read. Don't just stick some medical jargon and some huge number as a line item and expect patients to just blindly pay it without question. At best, expect them to question it (which is how most of the inaccuracies are found), and at worst, they'll just ignore the bill entirely, especially if it's out of their financial reach. Giving the patient a clean, easy to understand, reasonable and most importantly accurate hospital bill would at least give hospitals some chance of getting some of the money.

    Third, if they want to go after someone for the money, go after the god damned insurance companies. Tell them to cover what they said they were going to cover. Tell them to stop weaseling out of paying by using semantics and doublespeak to get away with not paying on a technicality. Tell them to stop with the sky-high deductibles. But you were never going to get any of the money by harassing and ruining the credit of a mother of two who was already struggling to make ends meet before whatever health issues brought her to the hospital in the first place. That $12,000 bill you sent her? Might as well have been for $12,000,000,000. You had the exact same chances of that person being able to pay off either one in the first place: 0.

    And finally, stop sending multiple bills that are days, weeks, or even months apart. I don't care how "independent" your doctors are or whatever the case is. I should expect to get one hospital bill, not half a dozen spread out over months. How you accomplish this shouldn't be my problem. But if you're going to continue doing this, don't be surprised when those bills go unpaid or are lost in the shuffle because the patient thinks they already handled that and just proceed to ignore it. Patients shouldn't suffer because hospitals can't figure out how the hell to even bill their patients properly.

    If hospitals want their money, let them get it from the insurance companies that we're paying thousands of dollars a month to in the first place, not the people who never wanted to be in a situation where they needed hospital care and would never have the resources to pay it back in the first place. Let the patients try to rebuild their lives, and go after the insurance companies that we're paying to handle this for us.

  • Yes...it should. The only answer to this problem is universal healthcare...period. if this were implemented poor people will be in crippling debt the rest of their lives and once again the middle class will eat even higher insurance premiums to make up for it.

    Big healthcare will get aggressive around settling it's debts and it will squeeze blood from a stone if it has to.

    Universal Healthcare or nothing.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Too often, patients receive bills filled with hard-to-interpret codes and outright errors — where a mistake can add thousands of dollars in costs but require weeks of persistence to unravel.

    Over the past decade, research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and independent experts has demonstrated that medical bills should be treated differently than other kinds of debt.

    If the CFPB finalizes the rule as proposed, we estimate this action will remove $49 billion of medical debts that unfairly lower the credit scores of 15 million Americans.

    We expect that people affected by the change will see their credit scores rise by an average of 20 points and that lenders will be able to approve approximately 22,000 additional safe mortgages every year.

    States like Colorado and New York have reached similar conclusions and passed laws banning all medical debt from appearing on credit reports.

    Companies that produce credit scoring models, like VantageScore and FICO, which are financially incentivized to assess the predictive value of medical debt, have also reduced their reliance on this junk data.

    The original article contains 676 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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