Medical collections can be a huge problem for anyone trying to repair credit.
We’ve all received unexpected bills from the hospital or clinic and wondered why our insurance didn’t cover it. Sometimes these bills are HUGE and most folks have a hard time being able to pay them.
Unfortunately this is not a debt that just goes away if you don’t pay. Medical providers sell the debts to collection agencies for pennies on the dollar. Then the collector adds interest and harrasses you for the full payment and often double or even triple reports the same account to the credit bureaus.
It’s a terrible system that hurts a lot of people. But, as a Credit Hero, there are secret ways to fight back and WIN!
In this article, I’ll share with you exactly how.
Here’s What You Need to Know
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, if debt to a medical facility goes unpaid, they have the right to take measures to collect the debt, including selling your personal information to a debt collector.
But, the information that can be provided to the collector is very limited.
They can only share your name, address, social, date of birth, payment history, and the location and name of the facility you were treated in.
That’s it!
They absolutely cannot disclose the nature of your treatment or details of procedures to the collector. This includes paperwork or bills that disclose medications you’ve taken, ailments or diseases you may have been diagnosed with or treated for.
So if a collection agency provides you with any of these details they are in direct violation of HIPAA regulations and face severe fines - and that my friend is the secret to removing medical debts from your client’s reports.
Here’s Why This is Important
The main purpose of HIPAA is to prevent anyone from abusing our personal health information and HIPAA regulations affect collection agencies if they are dealing with medical debt.
They must sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement to indicate they will comply with HIPAA regulations that involve protected health information.
In order to collect a medical debt, collection agencies do not need any of that detailed information about your health and medical history.
Collection agencies are also responsible for making sure that any protected health information they do receive is secured from unauthorized access.
So, how do you use HIPAA to delete medical collections?
It’s easy.
Of course you should always grab the low hanging fruit by disputing the collection with the credit bureaus first, sometimes that will result in an easy deletion.
If you’ve tried that, the next step is to demand validation. You can use the validation letters in your Credit Repair Cloud library and wait for the response.
If the debt collection agency responds with too much of your client’s personal information, or any details of any medical procedures that were performed, it’s time to put them on notice.
Use the Validation of Medical Debt (HIPAA Request) letter also included in your Credit Repair Cloud.
This is an interesting letter, and can work quite well to scare the bejesus out of debt collectors. You are essentially threatening a lawsuit for HIPAA violations and you can usually convince any collection agency to delete the account if they have violated HIPAA.
This is a great tactic that often results in a deletion.
At the very least, even if they don't delete the collection from your client’s credit report, you will likely be able to use this as a strong negotiating point and go after a pay per deletion.
For more techniques to remove collections, please refer to my blog post on removing medical collections from your credit report.
So that’s it! With the right letters and tactics you can take the power away from the collection agencies and back into the hands of the people they’re trying to hurt.
If you don’t have a Credit Repair Cloud account, sign up for a free 30 day trial at www.creditrepaircloud.com/freetrial.
And if you want to use our proven and effective methods we teach in our Basic Disputing Course for verification, disputing accounts, sending warnings, being persistent with reinvestigations, doing interventions, filing complaints, demanding validation and a ton of other real strategies that actually get you results...
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