Hospital Bills On Credit Report - Credit Counseling Services

The best way to protect your credit score if you have unpaid hospital bills is not let them go to collections. Hospitals cannot report your unpaid bills to the credit bureaus, hospitals simply do not have the ability to report that information. If you are at least making some kind of payments to the hospital they should not sell your unpaid medical debt to a collection agency.

Once a collection agency receives the debt, your approach becomes more difficult. If you are lucky and the collection agency has just obtained the debt, you may be able to negotiate paying the debt off before they put a negative entry on your report. Once the debt has been reported to your report, the damage has been done, though it is still beneficial to pay the debt off. Collection Agencies are in business for one reason, to make money, as they have no other connection to the debt.

Collection Agencies either represent the hospitals on a contingency basis, meaning they get a percentage of money they recover. More often they buy the debt for less than full value, sometimes pennies on the dollar depending on the age and the amount of the debt.

Ideally the best way to get the hospital bill off your credit report is to contact the collection agency, and pay the debt off. Depending on your financial situation and the age of the debt you can offer a full payment or at least a percentage. You would make a lump sum payment to pay off the debt. This is assuming the debt is valid and not past its statute of limitations.

When working with the collection agency, once you come to an agreement on the debt settlement amount, you would usually have 10 days to pay or the offer expires. To get the hospital bills off your credit report you are going to need to request this, in writing. You also want to get the collection agency to provide a written promise that the debt will be removed from your credit report. Ideally they would remove the entry entirely from your credit report. If they do not agree to that, you should request "paid in full" entry to be made on your credit report. Again it is very important to get this in writing, and use the offer to pay off the debt as leverage to have the entries removed from your credit report.

Once you accomplish this and successfully paid the debt off. You should obtain a copy of your credit report to verify the entry is not on your report any more, this can take a few weeks to reflect so its best to wait a month or two to verify.

At KL Financial Services we can help with your Hospital Bills On Credit Report. Or possibly give you advice on other options.

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Source: http://www.bestcreditcounselingservices.com/personal-finance/hospital-bills-on-credit-report.html

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