Editorial: Keep medical debt off credit score reporting

By The Herald Editorial Board

Medical bills are crushing enough without their adding to the financial burden of families struggling to recover from — or even grieving after — disease and medical emergencies. And a new state law passed earlier this year promised to lift some of the related financial burden, even if it didn’t ease the debt itself.

Senate Bill 5480, signed into law by the governor in April, prohibited the reporting of medical debt by health care providers and collection agencies to consumer credit reporting agencies, who use personal financial data and records to calculate credit scores. Those scores are key to establishing fair and affordable rates and terms for mortgages, vehicle loans, credit cards and other loans. The lower the score, the higher the interest rate for many loans and the more likely the denial of credit itself.

But a move by the Trump administration now threatens the state law, reports the Washington State Standard’s Jake Goldstein-Street.

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — currently being turned by the Trump administration into a Bizarro World version of itself before it is ultimately dismantled — acting on behalf of industry groups, moved to preempt state laws, such as Washington state’s, that address credit reporting, “consistent with Congress’s intent to create national standards for the credit reporting system.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-keep-medical-debt-off-credit-score-reporting/