Quote, originally posted by Bob Sullivan »

The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers. The project, dubbed “MedFICO” in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. ...

thoughts?

i personally think it would be the first step to socialized medicine. while i don't know the costs, on a conceptual level i think socialized medicine would actually be a huge stimulus to the economy and create and attract the types of jobs we want, building (new hospitals), high tech jobs (research), medical jobs (dr's and nurses), staffing jobs (all the clerical workers etc.). not only that but building government hospitals would allow us to increase the health of our poorest indivduals.

Quote, originally posted by Nelson Mandella »

A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

yes he was talking about jails there but i think it extends to medicine too.

i say this at the risk of someone making it a political debate... i do not want that.

Modified by jnm1point8t at 4:47 PM 1-18-2008

Should they be? Should someone in need be denied medical help because they are poor?

I think everyone's health should be treated equally regardless of financial status.

How to pull that off effectively, I don't know. I only state the obvious.

One one hand, it seems asinine to create some separate credit "score" that assess your ability to pay bills when there already exists a score that assesses your ability to pay your regular bills. Honestly, what is the difference?

On the other hand, does it even matter? It's not like the hospital is going to lock the ER doors in front of you because you have bad credit. That' just not ethical or even legal. I suppose it could work into elective procedures like plastic surgery or something, but a lot of that stuff gets done outside of a traditional hospital anyway... guess I don't really understand the point.

Hey, have you heard that some people don't want to move to California and that you can see the Stig on Google maps?

The only benefit I see is that your ability to buy a car/home might not be affected by your MedFICO score, unless of course lenders decided to use that, too.

Otherwise, I just see more bureaucracy.

David Mays

Probably because regular credit scores score mostly voluntary debt. Medical expenses are often large surprise expenses. So someone may be able to plan on-time repayment of voluntary debt, but not be able to pay once a large surprise expense enters into his/her debt.

However, assessing that may require more information than is available from regular credit reports. For example, two people have perfect on-time records with respect to bill paying. One, however, is just barely making ends meet and does not have medical insurance and will likely have trouble if a large surprise medical bill occurs. The other has plenty of reserve income and wealth, plus at least a catastrophic medical insurance policy (unless super rich), so would be able to pay any large surprise medical bill.

Depressing that this is necessary. Are they going to refuse care for those with low scores? Providers are in a tough spot, which will only get worse with the aging baby boomer population.

I have a very good PPO so the next time I walk into my local ER are they going ask me for my SSN or just take my insurance card? What is the SSN going to tell them that the person answering the 1-800 # on the back on insurance card wont tell them?

Now if I had a podunk HMO the same thing. I could have 850 FICO (550 FICO) but I still carry a podunk HMO which will say that the said hospital is out of network and I gotta pay 80%. So I was packing an 850 their probability of recovery is much higher than if I had a 550 ??