Consumers’ complaints about medical debt collection tracked in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Complaint Portal declined for several months in 2015.
Becker’s Hospital Review reports that complaints began to decline after August 2015, when there were 591 complaints. The number declined to 456 in September, 436 in October and 386 in November, according to the article. In December, the number complaints increased to 423, it states.
This year, there were 489 complaints in January and 419 in February. There have been 14 complaints so far in March.
ACA International member Rozanne Andersen, vice president and chief compliance officer with member company Ontario Systems, told Becker’s Hospital Review that the decline in complaints about medical debt collection could be a result of the delay in the CFPB’s publication of the numbers as well as new credit reporting requirements for medical debt.
Complaints with narratives are usually delayed for publication in the online database and consumers continue to file complaints months after the issue they experience occurs, Andersen said in the article. “Therefore the number of complaints for the last few months of 2015 could still increase,” Becker’s Hospital Review reports.
Andersen also said the decline in complaints could also be connected to changes in the timing of credit reporting the major credit bureaus in the U.S., Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, agreed to in March 2015, according to the article.
Under the National Consumer Assistance Plan, the credit bureaus do not report medical debts until after 180 days to allow insurance payments to be applied, ACA International previously reported. The credit reporting agencies will also remove previously reported medical collections that have been or are being paid by insurance from consumers’ credit reports.
“The decrease in complaints could be an indication that this longer waiting period is positively impacting consumers,” Andersen said.
In February, five Democratic Senators introduced legislation to permanently establish the National Consumer Assistance Plan, which was created as a result of a settlement between the credit reporting agencies. The legislation would remove paid-off and settled medical debts from consumer credit reports. U.S. Rep. John Carney (D-Del.) introduced identical legislation in the House.
Becker’s Hospital Review also found the CFPB’s complaint data shows that, despite the increase in medical debt collection complaints since August 2015, that they have overall been on the rise by approximately 35 percent since January 2014.
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[Originally published on www.acainternational.org]