medical credit score

This is scary.

Like most of us here don't have *enough* trouble paying our medical bills?!?!
medFICO

They say it won't affect your treatment, but you know darn well it will.

Phooie - Spit Spit......... I am glad that I have a good insurance company - co-pay only.

It's not like one's regular credit score, just figures out if someone is deliberately not paying their bill (or having a lot of elective surgery and not paying their bill) or really can't pay and needs help. It's only for hospitals which already can look at your regular credit score but like they say, that's for things you choose to buy and hospital bills are often not choice.

OMG I would never be able to get seen again!! My ex took my name and my social security number and my credit through mud, dirt, rocky terrain, and threw me in the tar pits to rot!!! A lot of it is medical stuff for him and kids...thank god is right, that my moggles has decent insurance!!! ~ Melanie

The medical profession drives me INSANE.

If you don't have insurance you have to pay X for services, but your insurance company can negociate for a smaller bill.

If the caregiver screws up your bill, therefore the insurance company refuses to pay, you're still stuck with the bill. What other company can screw up a bill and the "customer" has to pay for the error.

Everything is in code now because they don't want you to be able to understand the bill. Years ago, before the code system, I had to go to the emergency room for an injury. I was on paper sheets but was billed $60 for linen fees. This was 20 years ago!

The same hospital billed one of my 14 day old twins $20 for a witness fee for a drug test 1) the child was not seen in the hospital 2)if a two-week old child needs a drug test, why is a witness necessary?

Thanks for the note! Yes, our credit scores are used in a variety of ways most people don't know about... and I mean this has been done for a long time. That the medical industry is making it more obvious, is interesting though.

Good credit is a must! You don't have to have money to have good credit, though. Many tips of simple ways to keep it on a good level are available.

TC!

my regular credit score is really really bad...my ex used my ss# for so many things...I dunno how to get out from under it. i am just biding my time, i guess. i think moggles should have fixed the 3 things effecting his and not added mine to be considered but moggles ruled by love not matters of gaining 'things'.

it is what 10 yrs for some things to go away I have 5 left...lol ~ Melanie

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You don't have to have money to have good credit, though. Many tips of simple ways to keep it on a good level are available.

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Sky can you say more about that?

Well, credit is based upon how you pay your bills, not how much money you have. Even paying your utility bills on time is part of your credit rating. Often power companies will refund your deposit if you pay on time each month for year. That means you have good credit with them.

You can have a credit card without having money, and use it to make good credit. Open a small savings account. Then, at the same bank, get a secured credit card. This will give you credit up to the amount you have in savings. (You won't be able to withdraw your savings though, only use it for securing your card.) Then, if you charge just a small amount each month and pay it off on time, you will build good credit. The amounts don't matter as much as how you pay, and how responsible you show you are in paying your bills. (Once you create good credit in these ways, you can apply for a regular charge card, but you still need to pay it off monthly to maintain the best credit rating.)

Just as examples.

Thanks!

I have been rebuilding my credit the last couple of years and was able to buy a car recently after 4 years on foot. But I'm always looking for new ideas! Thank you for replying

The medFICO score doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you have good regular credit score or will receive treatment and they won't even know what treatment/illness you had. It's only related to a stay in the hospital. When you leave the hospital, the billing office will retrieve your score to figure out whether to write off your debt, bill you, or figure out a monthly payment schedule or what. It's an efficiency sort of thing to streamline the billing as in "no use beating a dead horse" like they do now :-) Medical bills are so high because they're so clerically intense so anything that says, "don't bother billing this person, he can't pay" will save time and money and help keep costs from escalating so fast.

Thanks, Perna. That makes sense.

Thanks for the info Perna, my blood pressure went down a little bit. If they're being more efficient, maybe they'll be able to bill my insurance properly!

How did you get to be so smart?

Reading stuff like this makes me glad that i live in Canada where most medical stuff is covered through provincial health insurance that you pay for with your taxes. If I'd had to pay out of pocket - I never could have afforded my 7 weeks in a psych hospital this summer.

And a note on credit. It's a good idea to check your credit report at least annually, to make sure there are no errors or evidence of fraud. Ever since my identity theft, I've signed up for a credit alert service that notifies me if someone tries to apply for credit under my social insurance number. I've caught stuff and notified the companies that the account was fraudulent before they had a chance to mess up my credit rating.

--splitimage

What concerns me is that we really don't know what all the parameters of the system will be yet.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont....299ccc0.html#

If it's going into play this year, odds are, THEY already know what it entails. That they haven't disclosed it probably means we won't like it all, and that also concerns me.

The issue a lot of critics are raising is that tools like this one can get misused (nuclear power can create energy in peace or atom bombs for war). This tool is for hospital billers for after the fact but what's to stop a hospital from looking up the score beforehand and not spending as much on treatment of people who probably can't pay? Even with any sort of safeguards they'll probably be circumvented by unscrupulous people :-( But something has to be done to keep costs in control.
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The medFICO score will be calculated based on an individual's medical bill payment history. A database accounting for $100 billion of hospital patient billings will be mined for the effort by Healthcare Analytics.

The medFICO effort has four partners involved: in addition to Fair Isaac and Healthcare Analytics, the IT firm developing the score, are Tenet, the hospital company, and the VC North Bridge Venture Partners. Each of the partners has invested $10 million in medFICO.

To put the provider's problem in context, Tenet calculates that their 63 hospitals had $433 million in bad debt through 3Q07. 75% of the bad debt was from uninsured patients and 25% from patients with deductibles they couldn't or wouldn't pay.

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http://www.healthpopuli.com/2007/12/...-hospital.html

Yes, but they will probably want a base to begin with, and I wonder if they will seek the regular fico score to lay it?

Since it's insurance companies' powered, they already use FICO scores and have them in their databases.

I don't think this will work in anyone's favor, myself. What needs to be done is from the patient side of it. Categorizing a patient will do nothing about being paid.

I know for a fact that those without regular hospitalization coverage do NOT recieve the same treatment as those with. This will only make it worse, imo.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to not cover anyone but citizens?

It's not related to insurance companies at all. It's IT and database people; "a database accounting for $100 billion of hospital patient billings will be mined for the effort by Healthcare Analytics". The hospital billing drives it not who was billed; they have all the information, they just have to "arrange" it is what's being done.

It's not related to individuals either, their FICO score doesn't have anything to do with whether they paid their hospital bill or not; FICO's based on credit cards and choices by the consumer; being hospitalized usually isn't based on choice. Your FICO score might get in trouble if you try to live beyond your means but hospital visits/paying is a different ball of wax.

You may pay your credit card and mortgage bills extremely well (have a high FICO) but not have good insurance (low medFICO) so are unable to pay your $400,000 brain transplant bill. Two different problems. However, just because you have crappy insurance doesn't mean you'll necessarily get "excused" from paying all your bill, you still may be given "terms" to pay over time or they may just make the bill less (like they do now) so your insurance company will pay what it will pay. I'm sure there will be an impact on insurance companies and value for money, etc. too.

I surely do understand what is being presented; my concerns are what they aren't telling us.

Here's an interesting blog on it: http://crossoverhealth.wordpress.com...re-fico-score/

They are creating the medical fico that will be usable to determine the creditworthiness of a patient, and their ability to pay. They have no other place to go but to the patient's regular fico and credit reporting. They create this out of thin air. How else can they figure out one's ability to pay? Just because they aren't giving us our regular FICO scoring, doesn't mean it isn't the basis for the medical FICO scoring.

Dallas based Tenet Healthcare Corp recently was fined $725 million for it's improper practices. Not sure that's a good sign at all.

Most people have been in the hospital and it is those bills and how well people paid them that is being looked up in hospital billing databases. In 2003 my appendix burst and I was in and out of hospital and testing for 5 months as a result for $30-$40,000 worth (instead of $5,000 it should have been). I'm sure that will be looked up and how quickly/well I paid those hospital bills will be looked at and what insurance I had and how well they are known to pay, etc.

Yes, perhaps because I pay well I'll get the brain transplant whereas some homeless person will not but that has always been the case, as you pointed out. I don't think this will cause any "additional" problems in that arena and will help eliminate some "obviously" unnecessary paperwork that can't be eliminated now because there's no way to use any of the databases to look up information on whether an individual paid well or was unable to, etc. So, that person gets forms filled out and all sorts of legal shenanigans and multiple billings and is turned over to credit agencies, etc. all of which costs "extra" money in time and personnel when there's no way they can pay in the first place.

Tenet's fine and misuse is a known entity and that's good; they will be scruntinized up the whazoo as will their partners but each of these companies put in $10 million of their own monies so there must be good money to "save" saying it will be cost effective.

If it helps keep big government out of hair, great! It sounds like they are big government on their own, though.

I do wonder, with great interest, why any doctor needs to know a patient's ability to pay prior to treatment. I wonder whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath.

I think ability to pay/Hipporatic Oath went by the wayside in our "modern" economy. Poor doctors do have a heck of a time, no respect anymore what with the Internet and all and so many customers as well as so many doctors. It's a smorgasborg out there with "specialties" and all. The "family" doctor literally doesn't exist; gone by the wayside like home visits. Machines and meds have taken the place of individual knowledge and costs of med school are so high that it takes forever for a med student to pay off student loans. Foreign competition (my doctor is from Sri Lanka) and managed "care" have usurped medical school knowledge and "alternate" medicine makes inroads on "customers" too.

Of course it's not just doctors with these problems, the poor patient has to be able to use computers and surf the Internet or risk wrong meds and crummy doctors and it's no picnic dealing with the insurance companies. Once has to keep up with one's diseases, can't trust the doctor anymore and that doesn't help doctor/patient relationships. One almost has to know as much as one's doctor! Set my bone or operate on me if you must but otherwise, I'm watching you!

The insurance company has to make sure its too many employees get paid through this complicated system where every little detail has a code AND make sure the doctors, hospitals, suppliers get paid but the customer doesn't get too screwed and revolt, not that that would get anyone anywhere.

My parents use to say, "old age isn't for sissies" but I think it's "life isn't for sissies" anymore!