Credit Where It’s Due

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Credit reporting bureaus announced in April that they would start taking most medical debt off of people’s credit reports. At first, we weren’t sure that would be such a huge deal. After all, the medical debt would still exist, people would still get harassed by debt collectors, or even sued over it.

But it turns out, there’s a bunch of reasons why these changes could be life-changing, and we want to give credit (the good kind) where it’s due.

The changes include:

Paid-off medical debt disappears from credit reports on July 1, 2022
Debts under $500 (even if you haven’t paid them) come off reports in March 2023
Medical bills under $500 that you received after March 1, 2022 should will never be counted on your credit report
No medical bills – of any size– will appear on your credit report until they’re at least a year old, starting July 1, 2022

Plus, some an end to some games debt collectors can play with your credit score.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there.
0:01.0	A couple of months ago, I started hearing from people on Twitter, on email about a story
0:05.9	that was starting to hit the news.
0:08.1	Credit reporting bureaus were going to take a lot of medical bills off of people's credit
0:12.0	reports.
0:13.0	I have to tell you, my first impression was maybe a little depressed.
0:18.2	I mean, don't get me wrong, this seemed like it would be a good thing for a lot of people,
0:22.6	but it also was kind of shining a spotlight on how bad things are.
0:27.6	That day's news stories cited numbers from the consumer financial protection bureau
0:31.7	that there's 88 billion dollars in medical debt, sitting on 43 million credit reports.
0:37.6	And number one, this wasn't going to make all 88 billion dollars disappear from those
0:42.4	credit reports, not even close.
0:45.0	And number two, well, even if all 88 billion dollars did disappear from those credit reports,
0:51.1	it wouldn't make the debt go away, collectors wouldn't stop hassling people for it.
0:56.4	And finally, this change wouldn't address the big problem.
1:01.7	How 43 million of us ended up with medical debts that we weren't in a position to pay,
1:07.0	which could be almost any of us.
1:09.0	This is not 43 million of us being too impatient to save up for a new plate station.
1:13.7	This is 43 million of us getting sick, and getting socked with bills that are usually
1:18.2	inflated, sometimes just in error, and that our insurance doesn't protect us from.
1:23.4	You know what?
1:24.4	I was right about all that.
	...

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