re: Medical Debt Should Not Ever Be Used to Harm Credit Worthiness

The problem with medical bills is they have become simply unaffordable for a large percentage of the country.

The solution isn't cancelling debt, ignoring the debt, or federal healthcare.

The solution is reducing costs. You can get similar care in other countries for far less money.

I don't need a fricking atrium with a massive water feature in my hospital for starters. (Just an example of the excess in healthcare)

Should've gotten better insurance.. or voted for Bernie

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This. Hospitals are more than willing to negotiate payment plans. The only way it's going to ding your credit is if you refuse to pay the money you owe.

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Sure

But most people aren't aware of that

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“Doctors and nurses shouldn’t be paid for their excessive cost of labor”.

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"I get to tell someone else what their services are worth."

FIFY.

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I like how you think these things are so mutually exclusive

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They are in the context of the original discussion.

If medical debt alone hurt your credit score your credit would take a hit whether you were paying it back or not just due to it being on the books.

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This. Hospitals are more than willing to negotiate payment plans. The only way it's going to ding your credit is if you refuse to pay the money you owe.

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Pretty much this. And you don’t have to break the bank to keep it off your credit report. It only hits if they have to send it to collections. As a general rule, as long as you are paying something toward the debt on a regular basis, they will not report it. My dad ended up with a $9K bill for an emergency surgery and 2 week stay in the hospital. He set up his bank to send them $20 a month in perpetuity and they’ve never given him so much as a phone call about it.

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The solution is reducing costs. You can get similar care in other countries for far less money.

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You can get labor for far less money too. That's because different economies are calibrated at different levels relative to the American dollar.

That's just one reason for the difference, of course. Another might be massive government subsidies or fully or partially socialized health care, which means that the care still costs a lot (in the native country's terms, at least), but if being offset by taxes.

Another might be taxpayer funded higher education for medical professionals.

Another reason might be that if you are an American medical tourist, you are able to travel to the hospital or clinic that offers what you need, but you don't stop to wonder how many hospitals or clinics in that country can offer the specific care you're after.

What I mean by that is this...in America the idea is that we enable enough hospitals to stay open so as to be able to serve emergency needs for people without them having to travel 400 miles to get to the nearest hospital. Not many would survive a heart attack or serious trauma if that were the case.

Now hospital systems in NYC or Chicago or Los Angeles make an assload of money. Those are the ones with the fancy fountains you mentioned. But hospitals in rural Montana or Idaho or Nevada barely keep their doors open. Yet people in those areas still have heart attacks and serious traumas that they need hospitals open reasonably close to them.

So our system is calibrated to make sure that those hospitals get paid enough on routine appendectomies and knee arthroscopes and other routine stuff like that that they are able to survive and be there for emergencies. The side effect is that yeah...hospitals in more population dense areas do clean up.

We could reduce costs and it wouldn't be difficult to do so. But a lot of facilities would close if we did. A lot of the medical tourist destinations exist in just that sort of context. The facilities you travel to are great and all, but they are the only facilities like that for 400 miles in any direction. Either that, or they are taxpayer funded.

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Timeoday

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frick yourself, Marxist.

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Now hospital systems in NYC or Chicago or Los Angeles make an assload of money. Those are the ones with the fancy fountains you mentioned.

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Portage WI is around 10K people last I looked. And 30 miles from Madison which has several "big" hospitals including UW Hospital. Portage's is the hospital I was thinking of when posting that.

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But hospitals in rural Montana or Idaho or Nevada barely keep their doors open. Yet people in those areas still have heart attacks and serious traumas that they need hospitals open reasonably close to them.

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I get that. However, anything serious is generally transported to a larger, better equipped hospital. My experience includes both parents getting Med-Flight trips to Madison for $26k each. I'm sure it is more now as that was 7 years ago.

I'm not saying it needs to be/should be dirt cheap. However it has simply gotten insane and there are a multitude of reasons why.