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How to Deal With Medical Bills on Your Credit Report

Unpaid medical bills take longer to hit your credit report and are weighed less heavily in some scores, but they can affect your credit.

A serious illness or injury can be disruptive. You need to heal, and you may be overwhelmed for a while as you put your work and family life back together.

There’s a strong chance your finances will be affected, too. If an unpaid medical bill makes its way to your credit reports, your credit scores could suffer for years. (Read more about your options for paying medical bills).

Here’s how unpaid medical bills affect your credit and how to deal with the fallout if you end up in collections.

Do medical bills affect your credit?

Unlike a bank or credit union, your doctor’s office probably doesn’t have a direct relationship with the three major credit bureaus that collect data and isn’t regularly reporting your payment information.

As of Sept. 15, 2017, there’s a 180-day waiting period before unpaid medical debts can show up on people’s credit reports.

Eventually, your medical provider may turn over an unpaid debt to a collections agency. The collector will then contact you and try to get you to pay up. At this point, your unpaid bill probably is showing up on your credit reports as having gone to collections.

This is where things get messy, because the information on your credit reports is used to create your credit scores. Failure to pay a bill affects the biggest factor determining your credit scores: payment history. Consequently, having a medical bill in collections can result in serious damage to your credit scores.

There is a way out, however: Medical collections will drop off a credit report if the bills are paid by a health insurer.

How to Delete Medical Collections From Your Credit Report

To have medical collections deleted from your credit report, you should follow the same steps you’d use for any other kind of collections agency account.

Step 1. Validate the Debt

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act gives you the right to ask a debt collector to verify the debt really is yours.

You can write the debt collector a debt validation letter asking for proof you owe the money. In your letter, ask the collections agency to remove the collection if they can’t prove you owe the money.

You’ll need to request validation within 30 days of your first contact with the collections agency to get the best results. If the debt collector can validate the debt, it’s time to move on to step 2.

Step 2. Dispute Inaccurate Information

If the debt is valid, get a copy of your free credit report and see if you can find any inaccurate information as it pertains to the medical collection.

Look for inaccurate information such as dates, balances, account numbers, names, etc. If you find anything that’s inaccurate, you should dispute the entry with the credit bureau — TransUnion, Equifax, or Experian.

The credit bureau will have 30 days to investigate your dispute. If they can’t verify the information is accurate or correct the data, it will likely be removed from your credit report.

You’ll have to stay on top of the credit bureaus. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires them to answer your disputes, but working with large bureaus is seldom simple.

Step 3. Negotiate a payment plan

When your credit report shows valid and accurate data that has a negative impact on your credit score, you still have one more option: you can negotiate a payment in exchange for removing the negative element.

A collection agency often buys medical debt from your health care provider. If you owed your doctor’s office $ 2,000, the collection agency may have paid only $ 500 for your past-due debt.

In this case, the debt collector may be willing to accept less than the $ 2,000 you owe. You could offer to pay $ 800, for example, in exchange for closing the account and removing negative items from your credit report.

When using this strategy, always make sure to get payment arrangements in writing before submitting a payment. After making the payment, check your credit report to make sure the agency kept its promise.

Some agencies may want a lump sum, but you could try to negotiate monthly payments.

Or hire a professional to remove the collection
Credit repair companies exist to help you remove inaccurate information from your credit report.

You will have to pay a monthly fee to obtain these professional services. But they can save you a lot of time and energy.

As you can see from this post, credit reports for any type of collection are complex and time consuming.

Let us do your work, hire Chireo Credit Restoration Services to help you removed your medical bills.