A Major Complication with Medical Cost Shifting – MedFICO – A Credit Score That Assess A Patient’s Ability To Pay Their Medical Bills

I can see the conversation now between the hospital Billing Dept. of a major hospital and a patient with an unacceptable MedFICO Score. “Well Ms. USA, I am sorry to inform you that because of your low MedFICO Score, we will be unable to perform your Quadruple By-Pass surgery at this facility. I am sorry but that is hospital policy. However, I want you to know that we are here for all your medical needs, if you can afford to pay. Good luck finding another hospital and thanks for your interest.”

What a Humanitarian Disgrace!

http://consumerist.com/346422/medfico-in-development-its-fico-for-patients

The Consumerist

Health, fico, personal finance, credit scores, insurance, medfico, money, scary

MedFICO In Development, It’s FICO For Patients!

From the folks that brought you the credit score system in all it’s glory, here’s MedFICO! It’s a new business project underway with the goal of assessing patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. The system would gather patient’s bill payment history from hospitals around the country and then assign patients a score similar to a credit score. Critics are worried if the same problems with people getting erroneous information in their credit report and then having an insanely difficult time cleaning it up would also affect MedFICO. They also worry whether hospitals would use MedFICO to determine the level of care offered, like whether the person gets a hospital stay or not. FICO scores are now being used by some employers to screen out potential employees, would they use MedFICO to see who might take a bigger chunk out of the health benefits?