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.
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.
I’m a millennial, you think I give a fuck about my credit score? Thanks I guess lol
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.
I doubt it.
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.
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
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
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.
Suckers, now im gonna get those bionic arms.
Ok? We could just pass single payer healthcare instead and that would have accomplished the same thing and more.
