- cross-posted to:
- health
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- cross-posted to:
- health
- [email protected]
The Biden administration is moving to ban medical debt from credit reports.
Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the proposed rule, taken through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, would reduce the number of Americans with medical debt listed on their credit reports to zero, down from 46 million in 2020.
In a press call Tuesday, Harris said the move would help improve the financial health and wellbeing of millions of Americans.
Medical debt, she said, “makes it more difficult to get by, much less get ahead. That is simply not fair.”
The administration calculates that if implemented, the rule would raise affected individuals’ credit scores by an average of 20 points, and could lead to the approval of approximately 22,000 additional mortgages every year as a result of the cleaned-up credit reports.
A recent study estimated that one in five U.S. households live with medical debt, including people with health insurance; and that on average, a typical American household owes about $4,600 in medical debts.
Credit scores weren’t even a thing until 1987 and the world worked just fine without them.
… except for minorities in the United States.
Credit scores were literally invented right after the courts decided you couldn’t reject someone’s mortgage application just because they are black. Now interested of a “Whites Only” neighborhood, you just need a high credit score.
Except for the part where credit scores were specifically designed to keep minorities down.
My point wasn’t that credit scores work just fine now. My point was: for a lot of people, the world didn’t work just fine before credit scores.
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