People with medical debt often fall into a downward financial spiral, three Yale Medical School academics said in a May 2 opinion piece for Health Affairs.
Medical debt collections included on credit reports can have consequences ranging from limiting a person's ability to rent a house to deterring patients from seeking healthcare, they said. The debt also can have adverse effects on physical and mental health.
Despite the prevalence of aggressive tactics, studies of medical debt litigation are limited by the difficulty of obtaining relevant data, they said. This data is necessary to guide reform.
The authors of the Health Affairs piece recommended that all state courts adopt uniform, searchable electronic dockets to make it easier to search for the data needed to guide reform. Currently, only a handful of states have online court dockets and only a handful are usable for research purposes. Without the means to search records electronically, researchers would have to manually search thousands of court records, a prohibitively difficult endeavor. Standardized medical debt reporting requirements should be instituted by all healthcare entities, they said.
They also recommended that the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and ACA's written financial assistance policy requirement be expanded to include all healthcare entities engaging in debt collection. The National Consumer Law Center’s Model Medical Debt Protection Act, which requires some hospitals to provide free care to people who fall under a minimum income threshold, should also be adopted, the op-ed authors stated.
The piece was authored by Alexander Janke, MD; Arjun Venkatesh, MD; and Brian Shultz. Dr. Janke is an instructor at Yale University School of Medicine and an incoming fellow in the National Clinicians Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Venkatesh is the chief of the section of administration in Yale's emergency medicine department. Mr. Shultz is a fourth-year medical student at the Yale School of Medicine and a fellow at Yale's Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy.
Read the full piece here.