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With the covid pandemic-19 , medical debt became commonplace for many Americans; however, in 2021, thousands were affected by medical debt claims that never existed.
According to a recent report published by the Office for the Protection Consumer Finance (CFPB), many of these claims are debts that families have already covered or that simply did not exist.
“This problem represents almost half of the complaints and, more importantly, the volume of complaints on this subject has been increasing”, the federal agency explained in its report.
The least important thing when finding yourself in this situation would be the calls to pay the debt, but the most serious thing is that many Americans in these cases are seeing how your credit histories are affected.
“People find out about an outstanding medical bill after they experience a drop in their credit score and are told that only if paid will the information be removed from negative collection”, indicated the CFPB in a CBS report.
There are already some proposals in Congress to protect consumers on “surprise” charges ”, mainly in the use of medical insurance; however, they have not received the necessary support for their approval.
Meanwhile, last March, three of the most important credit rating firms : Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, announced that will eliminate, starting this summer, reports of medical bills from your credit reports.
“The credit reporting system should not be used as a weapon to force patients to pay medical bills they do not owe,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement.
The consequence, he added, is that many of the people in these cases feel obliged to pay the debts to avoid problems.
According to the CFPB report , in 2021 sent more than 750,000 complaints to 3,400 companies that demanded collections from consumers. Of this total, 15% were complaints for attempts to collect a debt
In its report, the CFPB detailed that the average amount of these charges was $350 dollars for last year.
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