My credit got tanked years ago for a $95 doctor visit bill I was disputing that got sent to collections. Took me years to repair my credit. I spent most of my twenties with credit well below 600 and unable to get even small increases to my credit.

I hope this goes through and others don't have to deal with this kind of crap (or worse) because of the mess that is credit reporting.

Could you expand on why this makes such a big difference? I'm not very knowledgeable in this area. Is medical debt treated differently than other debts by lenders?

My first thought was that medical debt, like any other debt, has financial obligations that lenders would have to know about to determine the amount of credit a person is eligible for. Wouldn't medical debt payments impact the amount of additional debt you can afford?

It's not as huge as some people think. All 3 credit bureaus stopped reporting unpaid medical debt with an initial balance under $500 as of July 1, 2022, which is 70% of medical debt (when you have $15,000 of debt that's usually split 50 ways).

They also no longer report medical debt that has been paid - even if it is late. Additionally, debt collectors now have to wait a year to report you, giving you time to negotiate a more reasonable rate or have the debt discharged.

That's not to say this isn't good, but things have been improving massively on this front for the past few years. Reality is that with so much bullshit medical debt, the bureaus are going to have to either ignore it or nobody will be able to get a loan, which is worse for the banks than loaning out money to someone who had an unexpected 6-figure bill because their insurance sucks.

You're gonna need a Dem supermajority (plus a few, to offset any potential Lieberman) in both chambers of Congress for that. I wouldn't hold my breath for it. In the meantime, this will have a tremendous impact for a lot of Americans, which is great!

Easy to say, but what will all those senators and government people do without their cuts??

Does it help regular Americans? Then yes, yes they will

You mean the party of taking things away.

… except for minorities in the United States.

I had heard that medical debt cannot effect your credit. Believe me it can. I had to have a malignant melanoma removed from my back. I put it off until it nearly killed me (quite literally, they told me it was 2mm from my bloodstream and would have killed me if it got there) so I could afford insurance before I got it looked at. I received two bills. My wife was in school and I was making 34k a year for both of us to live on.

For one bill they let me pay $50 a month. The other bill they wouldn't accept anything less than $200 a month which was completely undoable for me. I told them they could get $50 a month from me or never see a penny. Two months later it was sold to a collection agency and immediately knocked my credit down by about 150 points. It went back up by that amount seven years later. They never got a cent.

Same here. Currently have a bunch of collections agencies calling me. Had to havey ankle put back together in November and I didn't have the option to consolidate everything into one bill. I very quickly lost track of who the fuck I gotta pay at this point. I'm just going to pay them off one at a time until it's gone. I can't handle working with 10 different medical billing departments that work the same hours I do. I had to take an entire day off work when the bills first came in to get it figured out, and then a month later I got more for different things and I gave up. I just have a stack of bills that I'm going to be going through and paying what I can online then go from there. I've been actually trying to pay this shit, but idek what's what. Life pro tip: don't break your ankle as spectacularly as I did. It's nothing but trouble

I was under that impression, too.