Who’s going to pay for it?
Bernie Sanders Calls for Eliminating Americans’ Medical Debt
Bernie Sanders has long wanted to remake the health care system so no one will have to pay directly for medical care again. Now, he also wants to go back and cancel all the medical debts of people who have been billed under the current system.
In a plan set to be released Saturday, Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator and presidential candidate, proposes wiping out an estimated $81 billion in existing debt and changing rules around debt collection and bankruptcy. He also calls for replacing the giant credit reporting agencies with a “public credit registry†that would ignore medical debt when calculating credit scores. (snip)
Medical debt affects Americans who lack health insurance, of course. But it is also increasingly affecting people who have insurance with holes, like high deductibles or limited networks of doctors whose care is paid for. Around 16 percent of adults with credit reports have at least one medical debt, according to a study published last year in the journal Health Affairs.
The plan calls for the government to negotiate and cancel the debts, though it does not specify the precise mechanism.
That’s quite a bit to unpack, eh? The plan doesn’t say exactly how the debt would be paid, because the companies who are owed the money certainly aren’t going to roll over and lose a ton of money, perhaps even go out of business over it. Nor does it specify who qualifies, so, does it mean that if you owe a couple hundred dollars Someone Else would take care of it? What about future debt? Will that be paid? Or is this a one time shot? It would surely entice people to intentionally blow off future debt, much like amnesty entices illegals to come in the future.
And then there’s the notion of what appears to be a federal government takeover of the credit rating system. What could possibly go wrong with that? And why ignore unpaid medical bills? Why not all unpaid bills if we’re going down this road?
It is interesting that it is “increasingly affecting people who have insurance with holes”, considering what Obamacare has done to the medical insurance industry, is it not? Especially since so many of the plans have high deductibles and limited networks.
While eliminating every American’s medical debt would probably not come cheap, Mr. Sanders’s plan could wind up costing far less than the total amount of debt he is seeking to cancel. Craig Antico, a founder of the charity RIP Medical Debt, which buys and forgives medical debt, estimated that the market price for $81 billion in debt could be as low as $500 million. Most past-due medical debt never gets paid, which is why bill collectors are often willing to sell the debts for pennies on the dollar.
There is that. But, again, it would incentivize people to blow off paying medical debt and then demand that government pay it, which would certainly lead to medical facilities keep private lists of deadbeats, and demanding more up-front payment.
