Arguing that medical debt “has nothing to do with your ability to pay your bills,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) yesterday urged the CEOs of the nation’s three major credit-reporting agencies to remove that information from consumers credit reports, Cleveland.com reported. “Medical debt does not correlate with credit risk; it correlates with illness,” Brown told the CEOs of Equifax, Experian and TransUnion at a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which he chairs. “No one should have their financial future destroyed because of a medical emergency, or a sick family member.” Testifying before the committee in tandem for the first time ever, all three CEOs told Brown’s committee their reports don’t include medical debts below $500. They said they would exclude all medical debts if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered them to do so but would not commit to doing so without that motivation. TransUnion CEO Chris Cartwright told Brown that credit agencies should continue to analyze the issue to determine what level of medical debts should be included in credit records. “I think we have to acknowledge that at some level, medical debt could become a burden for a consumer to incur even more debt,” Cartwright told him. “I think the best outcome is when all the players in the credit-reporting system, be it the bureaus, the banks, consumers, and certainly this committee, collaborate and analyze the information and let the data lead us to the best outcome.”
