Americans often “forced” to pay medical bills they don’t owe, feds say – By Alain Sherter (CBS News) / April 20, 2022
It may come as little surprise that many Americans are besieged by medical bills, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on. Perhaps more eye-opening is that this is often for debt they have already paid or do not actually owe.
In a new report, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that people’s most common debt collection complaints last year had to do with efforts to collect on a bill that they said did not belong to them.
“In medical debt collection complaints, this issue makes up nearly half of complaints and, importantly, complaint volume about this topic has been increasing,” the federal agency said, noting that such bills often end up on people’s credit reports and force them onto a bureaucratic hamster wheel to clear their financial record.
