The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to remove medical bills from Americans’ credit reports in a push to end what it called coercive debt collection tactics that affect millions of consumers.
Proposals under consideration would help families financially recover from medical crises, stop debt collectors from coercing people into paying bills they may not even owe, and ensure that creditors are not relying on data that is often plagued with inaccuracies and mistakes, Vice President Kamala Harris and Rohit Chopra, the top consumer finance watchdog, announced.
Harris told reporters that more than 100 million Americans had unpaid medical debt.
“Many of the debts people have accrued are due to medical emergencies,” she said. “We know credit scores determine whether a person can have economic health and wellbeing, much less the ability to grow their wealth.”
Chopra’s agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reported last year that roughly 20% of Americans have medical debt, but CFPB said its data also showed medical billing data is a poor indicator of whether consumers’ are likely to pay down traditional debts.
The Brookings Institution think tank also found big gaps in medical debt statistics, with some 80% of debt held by households with zero or negative net worth, and communities of color hit especially hard. For instance, 27% of Black households hold medical debt compared with 16.8% of non-Black households.
According to the CFPB, the Fair Credit Reporting Act restricts the use of medical information in credit decisions and credit reports. The agency on Thursday announced policy outlines that could give rise to new regulations.
As great as this sounds it is still incredibly sad that we have to create bandaids to allow it to continue instead of actually fixing the problem… it will only get worse.
Another way to look at it is that this starts to isolate medical finance from the rest of the system to lessen the economic shock of nationalizing healthcare.
Bingo. . This seems like a deft move by old Joe.
Got to get rid of insurance companies.
The ACA served to entrench them further.
thanks obama!
I mean, it was a Republican bill written by insurance companies. Romneycare in MA.That’s not new news. And it wasn’t hidden news then. Why do you think Republicans hated it so much?
because that was their answer for medicine and Democrats stole it from their platform, bc Democrats are spineless and won’t do anything to upset the corporate overlords. They’ll pre-negotiate amongst themselves like a bunch of bitches guaranteeing they’ll be whittled further to the right than they already are (Democrats ARE NOT left wing).
Once Lieberman killed the public option I said it to everyone; so much for hope and change? One party wants a shock and awe event to take us back to fuedalism, reneg suffrage and bring back out in the open slavery. The other party doesn’t have any actual vision, they just want to make sure it’s incremental.
This is how you fix problems. Make things better, where you can, where you can get the political backing to do it.
Don’t be one of those people that says “Its not perfect, so its not worth doing it”
Cause the only people that say that are the ones that want to actively sabotage the system, like how was done with the ACA.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is a feature not a bug, after all, both parties serve capitalism and the status quo, neither is there to make life or society any better for people.
What else are you supposed to do when you cut yourself crawling across shards of broken glass on the way to the refrigerator? Besides, even if you wanted to clean it up, your state is run by anti-sweeping politicians because your neighbors don’t want their tax dollars going to Big Broom and helping you clean when you should really be spending your time working at the Fragile Dinnerware factory. Maybe you should consider living in a house that’s not filled with broken glass. But your neighbors really would like to let you use this bandaid — who doesn’t love a feel-good story???