I agree with dungle6, whose comment is now dead. I say screw them and don't pay. Ignore collections for a few years and don't be a wuss about your credit score. Problem solved.
I don't get this statement. Not protecting your credit score can cost you real money. Yeah, the whole thing is a racket, and I frickin' hate it, but, pretending like you can ignore your credit score without impact seems counterproductive.
I would really rather see this whole racket of a medical billing system held to account versus advocating that we allow them to punish us in any way for not playing their fraudulent game.
I agree with your second statement, but I have spent most of my 20s and a great portion of my 30s with crazy negative stuff on my credit report. I flatly refuse to pay outrageous collection fees, and there are at least three items on my credit report which are outright lies. For example, switching from Verizon to T-Mobile, and T-Mobile handed out gift Mastercards to pay the early termination fees for getting out of your Verizon contract. well, Verizon refused to accept my $350 gift Mastercard, so I mailed it to them certified mail. They received it. I have the receipt. But now I have a $400 item on my credit report that I refuse to pay. An administrative mistake the Army made, and now there's another $900 item on my credit report that I refuse to pay because it's a clerical error. That last one's interesting, because I have signed witness statements from a finance guy involved in making the mistake, yet they refuse to clear it, so I refuse to pay it.
Despite this, I have been able to get a car loan, I got a VA loan for a house, I have opened two credit cards (which I use responsibly) since then, and also was able to get a personal loan for an emergency six years ago. It is absolutely possible to do "normal" things. It's just been a matter of explaining the situation.
I hear you, and most of us probably have similar stories to tell. There are really two rackets here: credit reporting agencies and medical billing. Then, they have the audacity to add debt collectors to the mix, who primarily harrass you and threaten to blow up your credit score.
Clearing errors involves a byzantine maze and way too much time in an era when everything is digital. There should be stringent regulation around accuracy and we should all have free year-round, real-time access to our credit scores.
But, my point here is not that you can't live a normal life with a few credit dings. It's that those dings represent punishment that can impact you. For instance, you may not have gotten the best interest rate available on your subsequent credit. So, we should be advocating an end to these fraudulent medical billing practices vs accepting punishment from them, then trying to live with it.
BTW, I predict Verizon will soon be the target of some hefty class-action. They are very shady when it comes to contracts. They also have periods wherein substantial numbers of customers report mysterious, frequently dramatic data overages for a time [0] that suddenly disappear. But, they refuse to acknowledge any issues.
And they specialize in making it extremely difficult to achieve resolution, with multiple phone calls, etc.
This may cause a cascading effect on your credit score. Certain banks tend to trim credit lines or outright close it when collections are reported on credit reports, which in turn increases utilization of credit lines which in turn drops score, which in turn leads to new reviews.
That's bad advice for the HN crowd because as much as they all say they love the valley they all have their eyes on home ownership and GTFOing in about that timeline.
