The Illinois legislature is sending a bill to the desk of Gov. JB Pritzker that would make the state the latest to ban medical debt from appearing on consumers’ credit reports.
The Details: SB2933 was introduced in late January by state Sen. Steve Stadelman, a Democrat who has been in the state legislature since 2012. The bill passed unanimously in the state Senate in April. Last week, the state House approved the bill by a vote of 109-2.
What It Does: The bill defines medical debt as a debt arising from the receipt of health care services, products, or devices. Medical debts do not include debts charged to a credit card or an open-end or close-end extension of credit made by a financial institution to a borrower unless the open-end or close-end extension of credit may be used by the borrower solely for the purpose of the purchase of healthcare services.
Collection agencies are defined as any individual, partnership, corporation, trust, estate, co-operative, association, government or government subdivision, agency or other entity that either purchases medical debt or collects medial debt on behalf of another entity.
- If signed into law, under Illinois’s Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, it would become an unlawful practice for a credit reporting agency to furnish any credit report containing adverse information that relates to medical debt and to maintain in the file on a consumer any information relating to medical debt incurred by a consumer.
The Last Word: “This legislation, I want to stress, does not mean consumers don’t have to pay that medical debt and their medical bills,” said Sen. Stadelman, a Democrat, according to a published report. “I just believe medical debt is different than other debt. It’s spontaneous.”
Illinois joins New York, Colorado, and Connecticut in having enacted laws prohibiting the reporting of medical debt on consumer credit reports.
