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Comment by MathCodeLove | Hacker News Reader

What was the impact on your credit score? I imagine that had an effect on other parts of your life no?

There comes a point where your credit score isn’t useful anymore. If you have a good house with a good mortgage and the best credit cards and have taken any other long term loans you need, then you’ve reached the end game. After that point maintaining a high score is just for bragging rights. It makes no sense to pay a massive hospital bill the rest of your life instead of just letting it fall off your credit reports in 7 years.

Jobs will also look at your credit score, but for a retired person it can quickly become meaningless.

Why do employers care

Employers are looking for stability, so a poor credit score is a proxy for a risky hire (in their minds). Even if 50% of the low scores are due to either medical debt or student loans, it helps them weed out "undesirables."

So they have an excuse to not hire minorities and people of color who have lower scores on average.

You might abuse your position for illicit gain in order to pay off debts.

It hurt my credit score(as in the number quite a bit), but not as much as I thought it would, I was really worried I wouldn’t get approved for things, but I was informed that when underwriters are reviewing credit reports, medical debt doesn’t carry much weight, as ‘everyone’ has it and it doesn’t reflect on how responsible or impulsive the debtor is.

As a non-US citizen, the more I read this thread, the more bonkers the whole system is. How the fuck does healthcare even work at all?

>How the fuck does healthcare even work at all?

It doesn't, unless you are wealthy, otherwise you try and 'walk off' any issues until they become obviously life threatening, then you go to the hospital and if you have insurance, you hope the insurance will approve the operation you need, and if you don't have insurance you hope the cost wont bankrupt you.

My worry is that as this happens more and more, the health care industry will come up with their own score, and will refuse to serve people that don’t pay their medical debts.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act prevents any hospital which accepts Medicare/Medicaid from turning away patients in critical conditions. They have to at least provide stabilization and some kind of basic medical screening services to everyone who arrives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

As for other doctor's offices or planned procedures, I think they already can decide to not work with you if you don't pay them. Maybe there's something similar for general practice stuff related to Medicare/Medicaid as well but for exclusively private pay practices I can't imagine something forcing those providers to offer non-emergency services.

A law signed by Ronald Reagan prevents denial of treatment based on ability to pay.

However, it doesn't specify what treatment will be provided, so more likely, hospitals would use that sort of information to limit treatment to ER-level interventions and then recommend a wait-n-see approach as followup.

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