Sarah Rathner
speaker
124 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Feb 2023
Sarah Rathner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Medical Debt Under $500 Will Be Removed From Credit Reports · 9 Feb 2023
podcast
Debt is often thought of as being this frivolous thing.
You overspend on things you don't need.
But medical debt is the result of something that's not your fault.
The Biden administration has made some changes about how medical debt is reported on credit reports and to what extent medical debt is reported.
So one big change we saw last year was a doubling of the length of time before a debt that had gone to collections would show up on your report.
So it used to be six months, now it's 12 months, giving people more time to negotiate bills with healthcare providers and insurance companies.
And then a change we're going to see coming up
There's a plan to remove medical debt of up to $500 from people's credit reports entirely by the middle of this year.
And it's already February, so that means within just a few months, people are going to begin noticing changes to their credit report accordingly.
This could potentially be quite significant.
Obviously, your credit score is made up of a combination of lots of different factors.
And if you have other debts or other late or missed payments, those are also going to negatively affect your credit score.
If this is the only mark that's really hurting you, you might notice an improvement in your credit score over time.
And that I think is especially significant because debt is often thought of as being this frivolous thing.
You overspend on things you don't need.
But medical debt is the result of something that's not your fault.
It's an emergency situation, an illness or an injury.
that you need to take care of and unfortunately can be quite expensive to resolve.
And so this could be very helpful for people who have these unpaid bills, they're struggling to pay them off, or there's an error on the bill and they're renegotiating them and then they're not going to be penalized in terms of their credit score just because they're going through that renegotiation process.
Yes, especially if an unpaid medical bill was the one thing that was dragging your credit score down.
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