The Biden administration finalized a rule Tuesday that bans medical debt from appearing on credit reports. While the move is not quite Trump-proof, polling shows that the majority of Americans support President Joe Biden on the issue.
“People who get sick shouldn’t have their financial future upended,” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “The CFPB’s final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe.”
The CFPB, created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is one of the government watchdog agencies Republicans are targeting for elimination.
In the little more than a decade since its creation, the CFPB “has returned more than $19 billion in cash to people who have been scammed by financial institutions, including predatory payday lenders and even some of the largest banks in the country,” according to The Hill.
“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Trump ally and billionaire Elon Musk wrote on X in November.
The new rule “will remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans,” the CFPB statement said.
The Biden administration is using this announcement to highlight the efforts Biden has made to unburden Americans facing crushing medical debt, like calling on states and localities to allocate some of the American Rescue Plan funds to eliminate an estimated $1 billion in medical debt.
The popularity of debt forgiveness—if not simply easing the burdens of medical debt—is unsurprising.
According to a study by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF, medical debt impacts everyone. However, adults in the Midwest and the South are affected the most, with states like Mississippi, South Dakota, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia facing the highest percentage of adults with more than $1,000 in medical debt.
It will be interesting to see how Republicans try to spin this win for Americans into some communist victory for the 1950s Soviet Union.
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