6 ms·

Consumer Credit and the Removal of Medical Collections from Credit Reports

67 points by momentmaker 3y ago

bbarn 3y ago
"Under 500$" - so, trivial admin mistakes for bills people shouldn't get have been removed, but the bulk majority of actual medical debt is unchanged.
- boredpeter 3y ago
  Another band-aid on the dumpster fire we call the American healthcare system.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Why do you interpret these as admin mistakes instead of unpaid bills?
  - runako 3y ago
    As an American (though not the OP), I think it's fair to start with the interpretation that any American medical bill is an admin mistake until proven otherwise. Until each line item has gone through a few rounds of verification, it's very likely that it contains at least one error.
  - ars 3y ago
    I always check the bill, in the particular the medical coding - I've very very very rarely seen one that was coded correctly. When I complain they offer me a "courtesy credit". Or I don't complain and just don't pay since if they can't be bothered to bill me correctly, I can't be bothered to pay. So yah, admin mistakes. Deliberate ones. Insurance just pays, they don't check the coding as carefully (how could they, they were not at the appointment). An extremely common "mistake" (up-coding) is increasing the length of the Dr. visit up a level or two. Take a watch with you, and check how long the Dr. was actually present with you, then check the coding. (And paperwork and nurse time is built in, so it's not necessary to account for that when checking.) They'll also bill for services they talked about, but didn't actually do. And they'll code separately for a service that's supposed to be bundled with another code. I've seen every one of these.
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      Thanks! I’ll be checking my bills more closely now.
  - bbarn 3y ago
    Because as a well-compensated engineer with good insurance, who pays his bills when possible at point of "sale"/leaving the office, some how in the last 20 years I've had several occasions where mystery charges came in the form of paper bills that I had to make several calls to get to the bottom of, sometimes 3-4 different amounts on different bills. The US health care system is crazy in many ways, but hospital/doctor office billing and admin is one of the more egregious. I firmly believe they make money by people simply paying every statement they get, some of which the insurance company will later take care of anyway, just out of fear of these "collections"
- isomorphic- 3y ago
  Medical debt falls off your credit report after 7 years.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    All debt falls off your credit report after 7 years.
8bitben 3y ago
> Less than twenty percent of unpaid medical collections remain on consumer credit reports for longer than four years. This is pretty interesting. I wonder what other types of collections are 'forgotten' well before their allowed reporting limit?
- smt88 3y ago
  I don't think they're usually forgotten. I think they're most likely mistakes. Medical facilities are stunningly incompetent when it comes to billing.
  - sidlls 3y ago
    Billing is incredibly complex, especially when insurance is involved. There only 68,000 ICD-10 codes, which will be what almost every care provider uses in billing. Providers notes supplement these (sometimes), but those aren’t always complete or accurate, and because every encounter has some unique elements it defies rigid finite classification.
    - smt88 3y ago
      I was referring to their seeming inability to track or resolve payment issues in a reasonable amount of time.
antimora 3y ago
Here is my recent experience that is not my fault. I received a bill from two ago. The provider decided to report me to a collection because they filed an incorrect claim. This was a nurse assistant portion of the urgent care bill. Everything else was covered but this bill was not filed correctly. The insurance won't cover because it is old bill but I am still on the hook. I wasn't even aware of this bill existed till I received a call. The bill is 3x times higher than what insurance would pay. I am totally under the billing gun and I am forced to pay otherwise they will ruiny credit.
- computerex 3y ago
  > I am totally under the billing gun and I am forced to pay otherwise they will ruiny credit. That's not how it works. You should have disputed the debt. If it was a billing mistake then you technically don't owe the money, and the charge should have been disputed. Get yourself an attorney, their fee to make the negative reports go away could be less than the bill.
  - 8note 3y ago
    > their fee to make the negative reports go away could be less than the bill. That is to say, somebody else screwed up and now you have to pay money no matter what.
  - nocsi 3y ago
    All an attorney is going to do is write letters disputing the debt to the three agencies. The reporting collectors have a window of time to prove it. Otherwise it gets taken off your report. Sometimes the debt moves across so many middlemen that the holder never even receives the request and the debt gets erased.
- ars 3y ago
  If the bill is so late insurance won't pay, you are also not required to pay. Threaten to report them to your state if they don't cancel the bill. Next get your credit report and file a dispute that that part of it is inaccurate. The vast majority of the time it just gets removed because the biller can not be bothered to submit the needed documentation. If they sent it to collections that's even better - just call the collection company and tell them it's wrong, and give them a long complex full explanation of why. They will drop the bill immediately - it's not worth their time to fight you.
mmmeff 3y ago
Something tells me that increasing the credit score and encouraging more debt financing of people struggling to pay a $500 medical bill may have some unintended consequences.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  See also https://www.wsj.com/articles/upside-down-mortgage-policy-212fd736 https://www.wsj.com/articles/upside-down-mortgage-policy-212... “A new federal housing rule will make reliable borrowers subsidize risky loans“
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  There is no law requiring the extending of credit to people whose income streams don't support it nor incentive for folks to take such loans on while credit scores can be used to deny folks housing, loans for cars that are increasingly unaffordable to buy outright even used, and jobs or charge them much more for homes/cars over the life of the loan. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the downside is trivially avoidable by either side and the upsides could be substantial for many folks.
olliej 3y ago
I’ve been getting semi weekly letters from an anesthesiology company (because of course they would bill separately) due to time I spent on hospital last year. Except my insurance paid and said I owe nothing. Then I received a bill a year after the fact, and I contacted mY insurance who again said I owed nothing, said they talked to the company and the company said they would correct the mistake. Then a week later the bill came again, and I repeated this again. I’ve now done this weekly for the last two months waiting for them to try to harm my credit rating.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Yeah. Good riddance. The credit system as it exists today is abusive. I fought a medical group fraudulently double billing me and took it to my attorney general and TransUnion. You can imagine my anger when my credit monitoring told me that I have a mark against my credit. This stuff with medical organizations should be criminal, but for whatever reason, they get a pass harassing citizens. Put a bill to this absolute nonsense, and I'll immediately vote to punitive damages for these corporations taking advantage of people. The bigger problem is that this is a cure for a symptom of a dysfunctional medical billing lifecycle that in its current incarnation should be outlawed.
- usernew 3y ago
  But your scenario has nothing to do with medical debt. Yes, the issue is with the credit bureaus - who are there to make money off you. In fact, lots of companies do that. If you google your name, a bunch of sites might show up reporting you have a criminal and civil record. You can create an account with them, check your record, and remove the bs they put in there. You can buy someone else's half-fake record. All of this is defamation, and is a tort. There's nothing you can do except waste ridiculous amounts of time playing the never-ending cleanup wars, or have your expensive attorney do that for you. The problem is how easy it is to get fake data into a report on You, that a company sells. They have zero interest in it being accurate, as the worst that happens to them, is they remove the fake data after spending about 5 minutes on it. After you spend either hours/days or thousands of dollars. I lived in a high-rise that gave free directTV. Never used it. Moved out. A bill for almost a year of some football package showed up on my credit report. Apparently they sent an opt-out letter for this expensive addon to their free service, and billed anyone who didn't reply. When I showed directTV that the billing period was for two months after I'd moved out, they did zero. I asked for verification of debt - the standard "reddit knowitall teen" suggestion. Absolutely nothing happened. I filed an FTC complaint - Nothing. For some reason, when I opened a case with the original yelp-type scammers, the BBB, I got a call from a manager and the debt was finally removed. What needs to happen is a barrier to getting negative data into a report someone provides on you. If that report contains defamation, and if you prove it to a non-currently-existent agency that oversees the credit bureaus, they have to pay you for defamation, w/o you suing them. Tens of thousands per false record, per person. The reason this happens is not medical organizations. There are always bad actors, and always will be. No one trusts the bad actors - they trust the TransUnion (they/them) report. TransUnion is in the business of taking garbage, and putting a trust stamp on it. Similar to what lead to the securities market getting railed.
devjab 3y ago
I’m not American, I never understood the credit system so I may have misunderstood it. I’ve always been a little afraid to ask, but isn’t it sort of weird that it is legal to score your citizens like that in a democracy? I can understand the need for a registry of people who cheat or simply don’t pay back, but even that is sort of an “evil” area to me since it can trap people. But an actual credit score? That seems very dystopian. And how do you score it? I’m a poor bank customer, I’ve almost never taken any loans, and when I did I either paid them back more quickly than the bank would’ve liked, or it was for tax benefits like with my 60% mortgage. I have savings and investments, but I manage them myself meaning that I generate no real fees of note for the institutions that house them. So technically I’m sort of a terrible customer for a bank, but I imagine my credit score would be quite high? /Edit Thanks for the responses. I'd like to point out that we do get scored in Denmark where I live, but it's happening when you apply for things. When my wife and I bought our house, we submitted a range of financial records, and we also granted the bank temporary access to obtain financial information about us from places like the national tax agency and the registry of "poor lenders". Which is I guess is similar to a "credit score", but to me it's different because it is generated and accessed at a specific time, and then gone. Maybe that's actually how the credit score works, but seeing those apps where you can see your "number" felt dystopian to me.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  Without getting into any real details about US credit scores, how would you determine risk on say giving someone a car loan? You’d want to know that the person has 5 previous repossessions right? A credit score tells you that. Without some type of score (in the abstract sense), you’d have no way of determining risk.
  - ako 3y ago
    The fact that banks would like this to better determine risk, doesn’t mean a society has to allow for it. Banks could also just accept the higher risk, and work with that. For example by asking higher interest or insuring the debt. There are solutions that don’t require big invasion of privacy.
anecdotal1 3y ago
Feels like a calculated move to bump credit scores and get people to spend money.
Walter75 3y ago
Students who have attained a low grade can be very devastated just like I was. Getting a professional hacking team like Coder Cyber Services is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I had bad school grades for more than 2 years, but then I was encouraged by an article to reach out to Coder Cyber Services who made something that once seemed so incomprehensible to me, seem so easy. I appreciate how they upgraded my files regarding my poor academic performance and left no traces behind. Currently, I'm a very contented student. Coder Cyber Services can assist you as a student in improving your academic standing so that you can receive the greatest possible school accreditation. Contact (Codercyberservices@execs.com) right away.

67 points by momentmaker 3y ago

"Under 500$" - so, trivial admin mistakes for bills people shouldn't get have been removed, but the bulk majority of actual medical debt is unchanged.

boredpeter 3y ago
Another band-aid on the dumpster fire we call the American healthcare system.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Why do you interpret these as admin mistakes instead of unpaid bills?
- runako 3y ago
  As an American (though not the OP), I think it's fair to start with the interpretation that any American medical bill is an admin mistake until proven otherwise. Until each line item has gone through a few rounds of verification, it's very likely that it contains at least one error.
- ars 3y ago
  I always check the bill, in the particular the medical coding - I've very very very rarely seen one that was coded correctly. When I complain they offer me a "courtesy credit". Or I don't complain and just don't pay since if they can't be bothered to bill me correctly, I can't be bothered to pay. So yah, admin mistakes. Deliberate ones. Insurance just pays, they don't check the coding as carefully (how could they, they were not at the appointment). An extremely common "mistake" (up-coding) is increasing the length of the Dr. visit up a level or two. Take a watch with you, and check how long the Dr. was actually present with you, then check the coding. (And paperwork and nurse time is built in, so it's not necessary to account for that when checking.) They'll also bill for services they talked about, but didn't actually do. And they'll code separately for a service that's supposed to be bundled with another code. I've seen every one of these.
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    Thanks! I’ll be checking my bills more closely now.
- bbarn 3y ago
  Because as a well-compensated engineer with good insurance, who pays his bills when possible at point of "sale"/leaving the office, some how in the last 20 years I've had several occasions where mystery charges came in the form of paper bills that I had to make several calls to get to the bottom of, sometimes 3-4 different amounts on different bills. The US health care system is crazy in many ways, but hospital/doctor office billing and admin is one of the more egregious. I firmly believe they make money by people simply paying every statement they get, some of which the insurance company will later take care of anyway, just out of fear of these "collections"
isomorphic- 3y ago
Medical debt falls off your credit report after 7 years.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  All debt falls off your credit report after 7 years.

8bitben 3y ago

> Less than twenty percent of unpaid medical collections remain on consumer credit reports for longer than four years. This is pretty interesting. I wonder what other types of collections are 'forgotten' well before their allowed reporting limit?

smt88 3y ago
I don't think they're usually forgotten. I think they're most likely mistakes. Medical facilities are stunningly incompetent when it comes to billing.
- sidlls 3y ago
  Billing is incredibly complex, especially when insurance is involved. There only 68,000 ICD-10 codes, which will be what almost every care provider uses in billing. Providers notes supplement these (sometimes), but those aren’t always complete or accurate, and because every encounter has some unique elements it defies rigid finite classification.
  - smt88 3y ago
    I was referring to their seeming inability to track or resolve payment issues in a reasonable amount of time.

antimora 3y ago

Here is my recent experience that is not my fault. I received a bill from two ago. The provider decided to report me to a collection because they filed an incorrect claim. This was a nurse assistant portion of the urgent care bill. Everything else was covered but this bill was not filed correctly. The insurance won't cover because it is old bill but I am still on the hook. I wasn't even aware of this bill existed till I received a call. The bill is 3x times higher than what insurance would pay. I am totally under the billing gun and I am forced to pay otherwise they will ruiny credit.

computerex 3y ago
> I am totally under the billing gun and I am forced to pay otherwise they will ruiny credit. That's not how it works. You should have disputed the debt. If it was a billing mistake then you technically don't owe the money, and the charge should have been disputed. Get yourself an attorney, their fee to make the negative reports go away could be less than the bill.
- 8note 3y ago
  > their fee to make the negative reports go away could be less than the bill. That is to say, somebody else screwed up and now you have to pay money no matter what.
- nocsi 3y ago
  All an attorney is going to do is write letters disputing the debt to the three agencies. The reporting collectors have a window of time to prove it. Otherwise it gets taken off your report. Sometimes the debt moves across so many middlemen that the holder never even receives the request and the debt gets erased.
ars 3y ago
If the bill is so late insurance won't pay, you are also not required to pay. Threaten to report them to your state if they don't cancel the bill. Next get your credit report and file a dispute that that part of it is inaccurate. The vast majority of the time it just gets removed because the biller can not be bothered to submit the needed documentation. If they sent it to collections that's even better - just call the collection company and tell them it's wrong, and give them a long complex full explanation of why. They will drop the bill immediately - it's not worth their time to fight you.

mmmeff 3y ago

Something tells me that increasing the credit score and encouraging more debt financing of people struggling to pay a $500 medical bill may have some unintended consequences.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
See also https://www.wsj.com/articles/upside-down-mortgage-policy-212fd736 https://www.wsj.com/articles/upside-down-mortgage-policy-212... “A new federal housing rule will make reliable borrowers subsidize risky loans“
michaelmrose 3y ago
There is no law requiring the extending of credit to people whose income streams don't support it nor incentive for folks to take such loans on while credit scores can be used to deny folks housing, loans for cars that are increasingly unaffordable to buy outright even used, and jobs or charge them much more for homes/cars over the life of the loan. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the downside is trivially avoidable by either side and the upsides could be substantial for many folks.

olliej 3y ago

I’ve been getting semi weekly letters from an anesthesiology company (because of course they would bill separately) due to time I spent on hospital last year. Except my insurance paid and said I owe nothing. Then I received a bill a year after the fact, and I contacted mY insurance who again said I owed nothing, said they talked to the company and the company said they would correct the mistake. Then a week later the bill came again, and I repeated this again. I’ve now done this weekly for the last two months waiting for them to try to harm my credit rating.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

Yeah. Good riddance. The credit system as it exists today is abusive. I fought a medical group fraudulently double billing me and took it to my attorney general and TransUnion. You can imagine my anger when my credit monitoring told me that I have a mark against my credit. This stuff with medical organizations should be criminal, but for whatever reason, they get a pass harassing citizens. Put a bill to this absolute nonsense, and I'll immediately vote to punitive damages for these corporations taking advantage of people. The bigger problem is that this is a cure for a symptom of a dysfunctional medical billing lifecycle that in its current incarnation should be outlawed.

usernew 3y ago
But your scenario has nothing to do with medical debt. Yes, the issue is with the credit bureaus - who are there to make money off you. In fact, lots of companies do that. If you google your name, a bunch of sites might show up reporting you have a criminal and civil record. You can create an account with them, check your record, and remove the bs they put in there. You can buy someone else's half-fake record. All of this is defamation, and is a tort. There's nothing you can do except waste ridiculous amounts of time playing the never-ending cleanup wars, or have your expensive attorney do that for you. The problem is how easy it is to get fake data into a report on You, that a company sells. They have zero interest in it being accurate, as the worst that happens to them, is they remove the fake data after spending about 5 minutes on it. After you spend either hours/days or thousands of dollars. I lived in a high-rise that gave free directTV. Never used it. Moved out. A bill for almost a year of some football package showed up on my credit report. Apparently they sent an opt-out letter for this expensive addon to their free service, and billed anyone who didn't reply. When I showed directTV that the billing period was for two months after I'd moved out, they did zero. I asked for verification of debt - the standard "reddit knowitall teen" suggestion. Absolutely nothing happened. I filed an FTC complaint - Nothing. For some reason, when I opened a case with the original yelp-type scammers, the BBB, I got a call from a manager and the debt was finally removed. What needs to happen is a barrier to getting negative data into a report someone provides on you. If that report contains defamation, and if you prove it to a non-currently-existent agency that oversees the credit bureaus, they have to pay you for defamation, w/o you suing them. Tens of thousands per false record, per person. The reason this happens is not medical organizations. There are always bad actors, and always will be. No one trusts the bad actors - they trust the TransUnion (they/them) report. TransUnion is in the business of taking garbage, and putting a trust stamp on it. Similar to what lead to the securities market getting railed.

devjab 3y ago

I’m not American, I never understood the credit system so I may have misunderstood it. I’ve always been a little afraid to ask, but isn’t it sort of weird that it is legal to score your citizens like that in a democracy? I can understand the need for a registry of people who cheat or simply don’t pay back, but even that is sort of an “evil” area to me since it can trap people. But an actual credit score? That seems very dystopian. And how do you score it? I’m a poor bank customer, I’ve almost never taken any loans, and when I did I either paid them back more quickly than the bank would’ve liked, or it was for tax benefits like with my 60% mortgage. I have savings and investments, but I manage them myself meaning that I generate no real fees of note for the institutions that house them. So technically I’m sort of a terrible customer for a bank, but I imagine my credit score would be quite high? /Edit Thanks for the responses. I'd like to point out that we do get scored in Denmark where I live, but it's happening when you apply for things. When my wife and I bought our house, we submitted a range of financial records, and we also granted the bank temporary access to obtain financial information about us from places like the national tax agency and the registry of "poor lenders". Which is I guess is similar to a "credit score", but to me it's different because it is generated and accessed at a specific time, and then gone. Maybe that's actually how the credit score works, but seeing those apps where you can see your "number" felt dystopian to me.

ryanSrich 3y ago
Without getting into any real details about US credit scores, how would you determine risk on say giving someone a car loan? You’d want to know that the person has 5 previous repossessions right? A credit score tells you that. Without some type of score (in the abstract sense), you’d have no way of determining risk.
- ako 3y ago
  The fact that banks would like this to better determine risk, doesn’t mean a society has to allow for it. Banks could also just accept the higher risk, and work with that. For example by asking higher interest or insuring the debt. There are solutions that don’t require big invasion of privacy.

anecdotal1 3y ago

Feels like a calculated move to bump credit scores and get people to spend money.

Walter75 3y ago

Students who have attained a low grade can be very devastated just like I was. Getting a professional hacking team like Coder Cyber Services is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I had bad school grades for more than 2 years, but then I was encouraged by an article to reach out to Coder Cyber Services who made something that once seemed so incomprehensible to me, seem so easy. I appreciate how they upgraded my files regarding my poor academic performance and left no traces behind. Currently, I'm a very contented student. Coder Cyber Services can assist you as a student in improving your academic standing so that you can receive the greatest possible school accreditation. Contact (Codercyberservices@execs.com) right away.