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 compa

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.