The Biden administration announced a major initiative to protect Americans from medical debt on Thursday, outlining plans to develop federal rules barring unpaid medical bills from affecting patients’ credit scores.
This is great news! The new initiative to protect Americans from the negative impacts of medical debt on credit scores is a big step forward in financial healthcare reform. It’s reassuring to see measures being taken to ensure that unexpected medical bills don’t have long-term negative effects on personal finance. Just as we rely on secure payments to safeguard our financial transactions, this policy could safeguard our financial future by preventing medical debt from undermining our credit health.
It’s a failure of society that medical debt exists in the first place.
Its a failure of society that modern credit score reporting exists in the first place.
Friendly reminder that Equifax lost your data, then tried to charge you for freezing your credit, and not a single person went to jail.
This is the first thing I think about whenever I check my credit score and it has magically gone down 5 points even though literally nothing in my life changed and all my bills were paid on time.
It’s so fucking infuriating that these companies that can’t even keep their (our) data safe have such inordinate and arbitrary control over our lives and what we can do with them.
For what it’s worth, a 5 point swing in your credit score is basically meaningless - just noise in the data more than anything. It’s not going to be the deciding factor for someone to decide whether or not to loan you money. It might sometimes make a slight difference in the rate you get.
Ban insurance. Force the hospitals to compete like civilized businesses.
Hospitals are meant to save lives, not be profitable
I’d prefer a focus on eliminating the for-profit health care system, or the credit score system. Adding more band-aids to an infected wound is a bad idea.
Honestly, if we’re going to have credit, as a society, then credit scores aren’t a terrible solution. Otherwise it’s just you pleading your case to whatever bank employee you happen to be sitting in front of. In the past, that system hasn’t gone well for certain groups that tend to face discrimination.
I get that, but it’s a bit of a red herring. Credit scores ultimately exist to mitigate risk for bankers, and the idea that it equalizes results for the population is secondary. Bankers should be taking on risks with loans, because that’s what the return is based on. If we remove the risk for bankers, but they still make interest, the system is broken.
It is worth noting that credit scores don’t necessarily eliminate bias, it just adds another step. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn if you could predict an individual’s credit score based on non-financial facts because some of the old biases were cooked into the system (by proxy or not). (I very much suspect this is true but don’t have it in me to go hunt down papers right this instant…)
An improvement over arguing your case with the teller, yes, but not necessarily flawless.
For-profit health care system should honestly just eliminated even if it takes millions of job away, it should have never existed. Then fixing a problem with the credit system, where paying off all your credit drop your credit scores. It should increase for that as it tells the bank “Look this person paid it off, and is stable.” Instead of “Paid it off, shame on you, we didn’t make any money from it.”
What do we replace credit scores with? How should banks determine who can be trusted with what loan?
It’s a good question. Consolidated credit scores like FICO have only existed for the last 40 years or so.
I don’t have a good answer at the moment, but I’ll also say that making sure that bankers are comfortable to the nth degree has not done the well for the average person in the US. Perhaps they could simply take on the risk.
I’m a millennial, you think I give a fuck about my credit score? Thanks I guess lol
There are plenty of us who do care, and I think protecting people’s credit scores from catastrophic medical debt is a fantastic idea
That is true, but also with interest rates so high and home prices defying logic does it really even matter?
For everything else that people do with credit scores? Uh yeah. Buying a car, having a credit card, getting any loan, renting an apartment, your credit score is used for a LOT more than just buying a house.
There are lots of jobs that run a credit check too
Yeah credit score is used for a lot more things than a lot of people realize
Fuck credit scores in general, they shouldn’t exist.
I think it’s generally a good idea, but could that incentivize people to just not pay their medical debt, and if so, what ramifications does that have?
If I’m saddled with a $100,000 medical bill that won’t impact my credit score no matter how long I put it off for, wouldn’t I just want to put it off for as long as possible (ie never pay it ever)?
If that happens, what do doctors/hospitals do if they never get paid? Does the cost of medical care go up for everybody, or could it eventually force them to start lobbying for single-payer, so that they’ll get paid something rather than nothing? Or do hospitals start restricting who can pay or do they start making you put up collateral before they’ll perform surgeries? So they’ll take your house if you don’t pay up?
Who cares? Healthcare should be free anyway.
But I’ll bite. With as much as hospitals gouge you on every single thing, they can afford to have some of their patients not pay. No doctor is going to starve cause you won’t pay your medical debt.
Different take: how about we outlaw credit scores and creating dossiers by companies?
I doubt it.
So if an unpaid debt can’t affect your credit score, can you essentially just ignore it without significant impact to your life? Like the only recourse the hospital would have is to sue you I assume?
They can still sell it to a debt collector who can harass you. I had one do that and those shitstains called me up at work. Really shouldn’t have given me his name and made his work address easy to find, would have made it that much harder for me to file a police report against him personally.
Hope the five dollars they tried to get out of me was worth it.
10 out of 10 love it
They write it off and sell it to a collection agency already.
Once it’s in collections the hospital doesn’t care and will no longer see it even if you pay the debt collector.
Or, they would be forced to lower their prices to what people can actually afford.
Or, they could then figure out that lobbying for single payer health care will be more profitable than not being able to charge ‘everything you own’ but not be able to threaten you.
I too like to dream
You know what would be even better? Not allowing medical debt in the first place.
We really need a bot to chime in whenever someone shows up with Infinite Leftist arguments.
Lmao! Too late! A bankruptcy and foreclosure too late!
Ok? We could just pass single payer healthcare instead and that would have accomplished the same thing and more.
There are too many Republicans in the legislature to make that happen. Give Democrats a sizeable majority, enough to make Manchin and Sinema’s votes to not count, and sure. Until then, this is great
Suckers, now im gonna get those bionic arms.
Such a great change!
Ok gloomer
