Consumer Law

Credit Scores To Be Used By Hospitals?

By M. Stan Herring

Most of us are familiar with credit scores and how they determine, to some extent, the type of loan we may qualify for but yesterday we read about a new type of credit scoring - it will measure your reliability to pay medical bills.

This interesting (and somewhat disturbing) product is discussed in several places and we won't repeat what has already been said - instead we recommend you check out the following posts about this.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/the-doctor-wi-1.html#posts
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/editorials/13719526.html
http://consumerist.com/346422/medfico-in-development-its-fico-for-patients
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed_medfico_0102jan02,0,4105866.story

We will continue to monitor this and in particular we will see if this will be covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If it is not, then state law should regulate this so Alabama consumers should have protection either way in case there are errors that are not corrected.

Full post as published by Alabama Consumer Blog on January 19, 2008 (boomark / email).