The cost of health care is one of the leading reasons for a consumer debt in this country.

More than 100 million Americans are burdened with medical bills they can't pay.

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB,

issued new rules banning credit agencies from including medical debt on credit reports.

Those rules are set to take effect in mid-March.

Ali Rogan discussed what this new protection will mean for people carrying medical debt with

Noam Levy, a senior correspondent with KFF Health News.

Noam Levy, thank you so much for joining us.

So tell us first about what sort

of medical debt ends up on people's credit reports. So most people probably are familiar with

if they don't pay a medical bill, maybe it gets sent to collections, but only some medical bills

actually get reported on people's credit scores. So it really depends on kind of what the hospital

or what the doctor does. But the tricky thing for consumers is you may not know, or patients, you may not know when you go to the hospital how much jeopardy you're really in.

But now this new rule is going to eliminate that completely, right? Tell us how that's going to work. That's right. So there are about 15 million people who still have some kind of medical debt on their credit

score.

And what this regulation will do is force the credit reporting agencies to remove those bills.

So people will no longer have any medical debt on their credit reports.

And it will also prohibit lenders from considering unpaid medical bills as they make decisions about whether or not to extend somebody a mortgage or some other kind of loan.

Is this going to have a retroactive effect or how is that going to work?

Effectively, yes, because if you have a medical bill on there, it's going to go away. There's a tricky part of this in the sense that if you've put a medical bill on a credit

card or you've taken out some other kind of loan, and we know people are doing this a lot,

that is still going to show up on a credit score as like credit card debt.

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