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people this is just crumbs
medical debt gets sold to debt buyers and once that is done it is just debt not medical debt and is not covered by the crumbs the Democrats are throwing
Basset Healthcare literally outsourced their ~~bumming~~ billing department to a debt collection agency. We waited months for a bill, found out they were in the process of switching and then got a very aggressive letter stating we were delinquent.
:: Left the typo in there because it's technically correct.
Even if it didn't, even if it worked exactly as intended, it doesn't fix anything. It just moves the problem. Now you're incentivized to focus on paying down other debts because medical debt doesn't hurt your credit. Now you're paying car payments, rent, student loan debt, credit cards, etc. first and medical debt last (if at all). Now hospital prices rocket even higher because even more people aren't making payments, insurance premiums soar further, and absolutely nothing is fixed. The system is broken and it's not because of credit scores.
We need to solve medical debt by addressing the source of the problem. Insurance. At minimum we need a public option. Better still, Medicare for all. Medical care should be socialized. Health is not capital. The threat of crippling debt or injury, disease and death without treatment should not be a profit generator for the protection racket that is insurance.
Yes however medical debt is covered under hipa. When the debt agencies buy your medical debt they are violating hipa laws. There are a lot of strategies for eliminating this type of debt without ever paying it. Usually simply asking for debt verification is enough to get it removed from your credit report.
My strategy of literally ignoring collectors and sending all their calls to voicemail (for a surgery done in early 2023 in which I owed a couple thousand dollars) actually worked. I was called once a week or so for a little over a year and I haven't been contacted since June 2024.
I believe I was dinged on my credit score but the penalty was low single-digits, and it didn't affect my eligibility to buy a house. Your mileage will vary, and I definitely can't in good conscience recommend this as your first resort. Talk to a professional about risks and benefits of not paying certain debts if you can't or don't want to pay; some debts are not optional. But yeah, some are.
This is the second time I've heard this in as many days... do you have any sources I could look at?
The strategy that seems to work the best is just to never interact with the debt from the start, it becomes almost impossible for them to collect.
And they say "vote blue matter who". No wonder liberals and left are losing in the past ten years. They abandoned the common folks instead of making drastic changes that actually alleviates the pressure of most ordinary folks. Never mind global inflation and its effects on incumbent governments, populism is clearly the way to go and that's why the both the right and far right is gaining ground. They know where the wind is heading while the liberals and left are still choosing to bury their heads in the sand.