| The impact on your credit report is irrelevant. Debt holders can (and will) sue to collect, win, and take the money by court order. Depending on the state they will take the debt, then take the amount it cost to collect the debt. Do people live in some kind of alternate reality USA where poor people who can't pay extortionate medical bills don't have their checking and savings accounts wiped out by private equity firms pretending to be healthcare providers? In my state over the past ten years 14,000 civil suits have been filed to collect medical debt. Up until last year it was legal for debt holders to place liens on debtor's houses, often their only remaining asset after being wiped out by an illness. It was only made illegal after a particularly aggressive private equity-backed firm cosplaying as a healthcare provider started relentlessly pursuing their debts, putting liens on elderly people's homes, and then aggressively pursuing judgements on the liens, and-- get this-- SNIPING THE HOME DURING THE LIEN SALES. A person cancer would not show up to court due to being a person with cancer, the private equity firm pretending to be a healthcare provider would get a default judgement, and then immediately start hammering on the courts to get dispositions and final judgements in order to add the person with cancer's house to their real estate portfolio. The state legislature made it illegal to garnish the wages of someone living below the poverty level at the same time because medical debt collectors were specifically targeting patients who could barely pay their mortgage due to not working due to being sick by garnishing what wages they were able to earn, if any, to the point that the debtor went into foreclosure (in order to facilitate the confiscation of their home). Please try, for just a few hundred milliseconds, to imagine losing your paid-off (or almost paid off) house, a scant few years before retirement age, because you got cancer. |