A Special Credit Score — To Determine Your Healthcare Treatment
February 14, 2008 by Miranda Marquit
Filed under Finance
There’s an interesting series of articles on US healthcare over at Leadership Turn. And while I’ve been reading up on that, something else has been brought to my attention: The fact that the Fair Isaac Company (of FICO score fame) is putting together the MedFICO.
The MedFICO will be a way of rating those that obtain healthcare. Basically, it is a credit score that you receive for hospital payment. If your insurance company is slow (or doesn’t pay at all), you get dinged. If you don’t have insurance (an increasing problem for many of us), and you set up a payment plan that slows down how fast you pay your total bill, you get dinged.
Of course, the developers insist that it won’t affect the care you receive. But in a medical business where money does affect the care you receive, that’s a bunch of bull. Here’s what Jeanne Roberts at The Panelist believes will be the outcome:
Given the large percentage of uninsured or under-insured in the U.S., coupled with the notorious inaccuracy of credit-scoring companies (which have a 29 percent inaccuracy rate due to slow or inaccurate reporting), the healthcare outlook is grim. Add to that the tendency of insurance companies to pay late or not at all, and healthcare in this country – if based on credit scores – is likely to become unavailable to many Americans, beginning with immigrants and the poor and “trickling up” to middle-income earners caught in the most recent Federal financial fiasco we now call recession. This is not a sustainable policy, and puts American healthcare below the par set by Third World Countries like India, Mexico and China.
Do you agree with her assessment? Is it really a good idea to add this to an already-questionable US healthcare system?
I like this idea but for the insurance companies instead of the insured. Every year millions of people choose between plans and providers. If we could see that one plan has a better pay rate and is more welcome at our health care provider’s offices, then people would gravitate toward that. The other providers would have to improver their scores or lose more customers.
That would be nice. Actually rating companies? So that we could be better consumers of healthcare? Too bad that’s harder to find nowadays.
I do like http://www.insurance.org. This does have a plan rating system and lists the basics of the available plans. I used it when choosing my current plan, which I am generally relatively happy with.