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Paying your medical bills is becoming more complicated, particularly as more patients become responsible for a greater share of their medical costs. And often, hospitals and other providers are turning over bills more quickly to collection agencies.
The problem, as my article on Saturday outlines, is that medical bills can be riddled with errors. Or, it may just take you many months and phone calls to figure out how much you’re really obligated to pay, or why your insurer is dragging its feet. But if you take too long to untangle the mess, it could end up hurting your credit score. If a medical provider hires a collection agency to collect the money on its behalf, credit experts said there’s nothing stopping them from reporting the delinquency to the big credit reporting bureaus. Debt collection experts said that it was ultimately up to the medical provider to determine when the debt got reported.
A consumer has 30 days to dispute the debt (from the time the debt collector initially reaches out to them) with the collector. And if the consumer disputes the cost, the collector is supposed to “cease collection of the debt” until the collector can verify the debt with, say, a copy of a judgment. “That would seem to include notice to the credit bureaus,” said Robert J. Hobbs, deputy director at the National Consumer Law Center and author of “Fair Debt Collection” (National Consumer Law Center, 1987). But “it’s a gray area of whether that is actually a collection effort.”
The Consumer Data Industry Association, a trade group for the big credit bureaus, said that consumers could also request to have the debt deleted from their credit report if the debt was invalid. But as we’ve reported before, disputing errors is not always an easy process.
“You’ve got this mishmash of consumer protection laws that might provide some protection, but aren’t specifically designed to protect consumers against medical billing problems,” said Gerri Detweiler, a credit expert with Credit.com. “We’ve given collection agencies a lot of power to harm consumers’ credit reports due to medical problems, without proper checks and balances.”
The article also discusses legislation that would erase medical debt from credit reports within 45 days of being settled or paid. Supporters of the bill said it would help people whose credit scores were unfairly damaged, while critics argued that it would undermine the value of credit reports because it does not distinguish between people who were truly delinquent and those who were the victims of billing errors or other mistakes.
Has your credit score been damaged by medical bills? What do you think of the legislation? Please share your experience in the comment section below.
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