Medical Debt To Be Erased From Credit Reports

In a personal injury case, victims go to the emergency room, to doctors, and need medical procedures. These procedures cost money, and often, victims don’t have the money to pay for these expenses–even if they have insurance, insurance doesn’t often pay the full cost of the procedures that are needed.

Sure, a victim may have a personal injury case but that case can take time to settle or resolve. While the case is going on, what’s to stop any one of those medical expenses from going into collections, and ruining someone’s credit?

Medical Debt and Financial Responsibility

Many people feel that delinquent or unpaid medical debt should not affect someone’s credit. After all, someone didn’t voluntarily get into an accident, or voluntarily contract some disease that required medical attention. Medical debt, it is often thought, is not a true measure of someone’s financial responsibility.

Medical Debt on Credit to be Erased

The major credit reporting agencies are now starting to recognize this, and have announced that they will shortly stop immediately reporting medical debt to people’s credit reports (the debts themselves will still be owed to the creditors; they just won’t appear on people’s credit reports and lower credit scores). Medical debt will have to be in collections for a full year, before they are allied to be reported.

Even better, people who have negative marks on their credit related to medical debt, will have those items removed from their credit. This should immediately improve the credit score for millions of Americans, who have poor credit because of medical debt.

Avoiding Damaging Your Credit After an Accident

One good way to avoid ruining credit, or going into collections because of medical debt after an accident, is to get a personal injury attorney. Your attorney will work with your medical providers, and help you get them to wait until you receive a settlement or a jury verdict, to make a payment.

Your attorney’s regular communication with your creditors can help stop collections calls and collections letters, as the creditor doctors will contact your attorney and not you. Your attorney will apprise them of when your case can be expected to conclude. Most medical providers are used to working with personal injury attorneys when medical bills are incurred because of an accident.

The attorney will work with various medical providers, from hospitals, to emergency service medical providers, and even government agencies like Medicare. Simply having your attorney on board representing you may be the assurance that your medical providers need, to keep treating you even if you have significant balances with them.

Negotiation After the Case

Best of all, when your case is over, and if any money needs to be paid to doctors from the proceeds of any settlement or verdict, your attorney will then work with whoever you owe money to, in order to lower the balance that you owe to them. This results in you putting more of your recovery where it belongs–in your pocket, to help you in the future.

Contact the Miami personal injury attorneys at Velasquez & Associates P.A. today. We can help you manage the expenses you may have related to your medical care after an accident.

Sources:

cnn.com/2022/03/19/business/credit-reporting-agencies-medical-debt/index.html

cnbc.com/2022/03/19/most-medical-debt-will-be-wiped-from-consumer-credit-reports.html