MedFICO: Your Medical Credit Score

My mouth fell to the floor as I read the headline, The Doctor Will See Your Credit Now! What on earth is going on? As we move towards a more money oriented society, the big businesses get their rights protected while the citizens get nailed to the post! In a nutshell, the medical credit score will provide hospitals and physician offices and all health affiliates with the ability to look at your payment history and determine your ability to pay your bill. They say that it will not affect your treatment but people without health insurance can attest that they have been sent home with pain medication after complaining about chest pains, only to return again after a full-blown heart attack, all because they did not have coverage. Healthcare Analytics is gathering payment information from hospitals around the country to put into its database and will analyze the data to help predict how likely patients will be to pay future bills. Now who thought of that brilliant move? Do they have any answers to the following questions?

1. Who is going to make sure that the non-payment of a bill was actually the patient's fault, and not some hospital's slow processing with numerous errors?

2. They say that the information is not going to be used by anyone but the health facilities, but what will they do to ensure that the information isn't used by HMO's and PPOs (who already have a stronghold on many hospitals and run it as though they are trained medical doctors who can determine whether a treatment is medically necessary by using mathematical models) to set up individual price rates (like auto insurance)?

3. Medical bankruptcy due to exceedingly high medical bills not covered by a health insurance plan that is already cutting out many services, is a reality (1.9-2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy - David Himmelstein, Health Affairs, 'MarketWatch: Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy'). Will they take that into account?

4. If a shoddy health insurance plan is to blame for the poor medical credit score, will the insurance company be held accountable, and the information noted on the file?

5. Who will oversee the bill collection and predatory collection agencies that will try to take advantage of this information? There are already quite a few fraudulent collection agencies out her preying on people with no real recourse unless you can get a class action suit together to fight blatant fraudlent practices.

6. How does HIPAA affect this?

I am just flabbergasted that someone even thought that this was a good idea. Oh, wait a minute...maybe it will make them large amounts of money. I think that this is ground that we in the U.S. do not want to tread on at all. Look at all the banks the problems that the predatory credit companies have created for the economy. It is pathetically obvious that the bodies that were supposedly overseeing all this were either overlooking the issues or were woefully inept. Either way, it is clear that adding yet another thing to have to watch carefully, particularly in this climate, is not a smart idea at all. I guess it's time to read this article to help us get ready to reduce our costs at the ER, since we will be spending quite a bit of time there.