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medical debt
Don’t Let Trump and Musk Fire the Consumer Protection Referee
As we enter a period of our history defined by billionaire oligarchs and the rule of the richest, it’s more important than ever to have agencies that stand up for everyday people, not only the ultra rich class.
Mar 07, 2025
Imagine a high-stakes football game where one team is notorious for playing dirty, skirting the rules, and making the game about brute force, not fair play. Thank goodness for the referee, right?
Well, now imagine that right in the middle of the game, the ref gets yanked off the field. Unfortunately, that’s the situation American consumers are facing now—and the other team is free to play as dirty as they please.
Since its inception in 2010, the CFPB—the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau—has been America’s indispensable referee. It’s the fast-moving, watchful eye ensuring that big banks, online lenders, and credit agencies play fair with their customers.
Musk is trying to destroy the CFPB to enrich himself—and prevent the agency from holding him accountable for how he treats X-Money users.
But the Trump administration is now trying to kick that referee off the field—permanently.
Without the CFPB, megabanks, Big Tech, and small-time fraudsters will be free to break the rules unchecked, leaving everyday consumers defenseless in the face of the fraud, abuses, and junk fees that are so prevalent in consumer finance.
With Elon Musk’s minions in the vanguard, the Trump administration has taken its slash-and-burn approach to the CFPB, determined to dismantle any government institution that stands in the way of corporate greed. Musk and Trump are defending predators, scammers, and crooks because a strong CFPB means less profit for financial companies.
The public knows the true value of the CFPB. According to a poll from Democratic and Republican pollsters, the CFPB is popular across the country—and even across party lines. Nearly 4 in 5 people say they support the agency, including 75% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats.
The agency’s popularity is no coincidence. It’s been earned through relentless dedication to standing up for people.
Since 2010, the CFPB has won more than $21 billion in restitution and cancelled debts to consumers who were scammed by financial institutions. The CFPB has also created safeguards against future financial crises, especially in housing, and cracked down on all manner of junk fees.
Congress established the CFPB as an independent agency to protect consumers from predatory financial practices. Now we have to defend the CFPB from political sabotage. In addition to Trump’s attacks, industry-friendly lawmakers are working to weaken the CFPB, threatening its ability to keep an eye on powerful financial actors.
Congress must reject these attacks and ensure the CFPB remains ready to do the job it has done so well. That includes defending the CFPB’s independence, funding, and integrity—as well as resisting attempts to roll back existing safeguards.
A CFPB measure to limit bank overdraft fees to $5, down from the typical $35 per transaction, would save 23 million households $5 billion annually. But that rule is now on the congressional chopping block. Additionally, Congress must protect CFPB’s measure to keep medical debt off the credit reports of the 15 million Americans burdened by unexpected medical expenses.
Before the Trump administration arrived, the CFPB also created protections for the millions of users of digital payment apps and wallets to prevent fraud, safeguard people’s sensitive personal information, and prevent Big Tech and other firms from freezing or deactivating accounts without notice or explanation.
Notably, this rule would apply to the partnership between Visa and X, Elon Musk’s social network formerly known as Twitter. Now, Musk is trying to destroy the CFPB to enrich himself—and prevent the agency from holding him accountable for how he treats X-Money users.
As we enter a period of our history defined by billionaire oligarchs and the rule of the richest, it’s more important than ever to have agencies that stand up for everyday people, not only the ultra rich class. People deserve a tough, honest referee in Washington that can stand up to Wall Street and other financial predators.
If the CFPB can’t blow the whistle, there’s no doubt they will play dirty.
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CFPB Bans Medical Debt From Credit Reports—But GOP Wants to Reverse It
The agency "effectively dared the incoming Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress to undo rules that are broadly popular," wrote one healthcare reporter.
Jan 07, 2025
Months after more than half of respondents to an Associated Press poll said it was "extremely or very important" for the federal government to take action to help people with medical debt, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday finalized a rule to keep such debt off credit reports.
With broad public support, the rule appeared to be an uncontroversial slam dunk for the Biden administration in the last days of President Joe Biden's presidency—but Republicans, who now have majorities in Congress and are poised to take over the White House in less than two weeks, have signaled that they would take action to undo the CFPB's regulations, including the medical debt rule.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the new chair of the Senate Banking Committee, said last month that the CFPB should halt all rulemaking until President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
"It is paramount that President Trump can begin his administration on January 20 with a fresh slate to implement the economic agenda that the American people resoundingly voted for," Scott said.
The senator's comments suggested that Americans who voted for Trump did so in order to continue paying overdraft fees, having their personal information sold by predatory data brokers, and being penalized for owing medical bills—all of which the CFPB has taken action on since the November elections.
As Noam N. Levey wrote at KFF Health News, the CFPB on Tuesday "effectively dared the incoming Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress to undo rules that are broadly popular and could help millions of people who are burdened by medical debt."
"People who get sick shouldn't have their financial future upended."
The new rule would remove $49 billion in unpaid medical debt from credit reports by amending Regulation V, which implements the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Lenders are restricted from obtaining or using medical information to make lending decisions. But federal regulators have created an exception to that restriction, allowing companies to consider medical debt. The new rule ends that exception by banning medical bills on credit reports, which the CFPB said has led to a practice of using the credit reporting system to coerce payments even if bills are inaccurate, as they frequently are, according to the agency.
About 15 million people will be helped by the new regulation, said the CFPB, with credit scores of people with medical debt boosted by an average of 20 points.
An estimated 100 million Americans owe debt for healthcare they've obtained, forcing many to cut spending on groceries, housing, and other essentials.
An informal KFF Health News poll of people facing eviction or foreclosure in the Denver area in 2023 found that nearly half of people surveyed said medical debt played a role in their housing insecurity.
The inclusion of medical debt on credit reports by companies like Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion can harm Americans' ability to obtain jobs, mortgages, and rental apartments, even as CFPB research shows that medical debt is a poor predictor of whether a consumer will repay a loan.
"People who get sick shouldn't have their financial future upended," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. "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."
Billionaire Trump megadonor Elon Musk, who has become a top adviser to the president-elect and was picked to co-lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, has made clear that the CFPB would be a key target of the advisory body, calling for the agency to be "deleted" in November.
Despite Republicans' repeated claims that Trump will lead the party in securing an agenda that serves working families, lobbying by the credit reporting industry over the medical debt rule has made clear whose side the GOP is on.
Equifax said in August, two months after the CFPB proposed the rule, that the government is "not permitted" to regulate the industry in such a way.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) also called the proposal "regulatory overreach."
Chopra said last month that despite Republicans' objections, the CFPB would not "be a dead fish" ahead of Trump's term.
"We will continue to defend consumers' rights," he said, "and to hold companies accountable."
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Was CEO's Murder a Killing in the Class War?
After UnitedHealthcare's Brian Thompson was gunned down, America’s health care powers feel and fear the U.S. public’s anger now more than ever.
Dec 09, 2024
Over 8,000 Americans, on average, die every day. Many of these Americans die unnecessarily. Their cause of death? The United States — our planet’s richest nation — still does not have in place a national health care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.
One particular American’s death last week has refocused attention on that absence. On December 4, a gunman murdered the chief executive of a corporate insurance powerhouse that regularly registers hefty profits denying health help to sick people who desperately need it.
That chief exec — UnitedHealthcare’s 50-year-old Brian Thompson — died on a Manhattan sidewalk after a short hail of bullets from a still unidentified assassin.
The bullet casings from the shooting carried their own message. They read, according to police sources, “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” a clear reference to the profit-first gameplan America’s giant insurers ever so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.
Thompson stepped into the UnitedHealth empire over two decades ago and, notes the American Prospect journalist Maureen Tkacik, spent most of his career there “running its Medicare business, the cash cow around which much of the far-flung health care colossus essentially revolves.”
Our health care system, in the end, shouldn’t be making our rich richer.
Three years ago, Thompson became the CEO of this “cash cow,” UnitedHealth’s biggest branch. His UnitedHealthcare unit’s 140,000 employees last year pulled down over a quarter-trillion dollars — $281 billion — in revenue. That intake helped his company’s annual profits jump 33 percent over their 2021 level. Thompson himself last year pocketed $10.2 million in personal compensation.
The chief exec of the overall UnitedHealth operation, Andrew Witty, at his end collected some $23.5 million, enough to rank him the nation’s highest-paid health insurance CEO. Witty’s take-home equaled 352 times the pay of UnitedHealth’s typical employee.
What’s been making UnitedHealth’s operations so rewarding for execs at the company’s summit? UnitedHealth operates in the shadowy world of “Medicare Advantage,” the program that gives America’s senior citizens the option to contract out their Medicare to private health-service providers.
These private providers collect fixed fees from the federal government for each of the senior citizens they enroll. They make money when the cost of providing health care to those seniors amounts to less than what the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services pays them in fees. And that core reality gives private providers an ongoing incentive to limit the care their patients receive.
No Medicare Advantage provider, the American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik points out, has done more than UnitedHealthcare to systematically seize the opportunity that incentive creates — “by simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.” Industry-wide, Medicare Advantage providers deny 16 percent of patient claims. UnitedHealthcare, the Boston Globe has reported, last year denied patient claims at a 32 percent rate.
The massive advertising campaigns that Medicare Advantage inflict upon the American people never, of course, mention anything about denials or the limits Medicare Advantage plans place on which doctors their enrollees can see and which hospitals they can use. That advertising instead, the KFF health care think tank detailed last year, typically urges viewers to call a toll-free “Medicare” hotline that has no connection whatsoever with the federal government’s official Medicare hotline.
Many of the over 9,000 ads that Medicare Advantage outfits run daily during the annual fall open enrollment period, the KFF researchers add, misleadingly suggest that seniors may miss out on financial savings or benefits “if they don’t sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan.”
For the Medicare Advantage industry, all this advertising has paid off handsomely. Just over half of Medicare’s beneficiaries have now chosen to take privatized care over the original public Medicare.
Seniors with the good fortune to stay healthy usually don’t give their Medicare Advantage plans much of a second thought. But those seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage who find themselves needing medical help all too often find themselves facing one frustration after another. Years of those frustrations erupted bitterly onto the national scene after Brian Thompson’s murder.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one online reaction to a CNN posting of a shooting video. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
“Compassion withheld,” read another reaction, “until documentation can be produced that determines the bullet holes were not a preexisting condition.”
Within hours after Thompson’s death, a research institute at Rutgers University had found scores of similar-in-spirit posts that together reached 8.3 million viewers across multiple platforms. UnitedHealth’s official Facebook report on Thompson’s death, meanwhile, quickly drew 35,000 responses using the social networking “Haha” emoji — and only 2,200 emotes expressing “Sad.”
Some of the fiercest reactions to Thompson’s death came from within the medical community.
“This is someone who has participated in social murder on a mass scale,” a medical student wrote in one typical post.
“My patients died,” a nurse spat out in another, “while those bitches enjoyed 26 million dollars.”
“If there’s anything our fractured country seems to agree on,” mused Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis, “it’s that the health care system is tragically broken, and the companies profiting from it are morally bankrupt.”
“To most Americans,” agreed the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, “a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it.”
That obstacle, the numbers show, has been devastatingly effective. The United States, a recent Commonwealth Fund study found, currently rates last in health among major high-income nations. Americans “die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths” despite living in a nation that spends almost twice as much on health care — as a share of gross domestic product — as any of its high-income peers.
Some 25 percent of Americans, Gallup polling adds, have people in their family who have had to delay medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn’t afford the care. Some 79 percent of America’s nurses, for their part, say they’re working in inadequately staffed health facilities.
Thompson’s murder won’t change any of those stats. The system that enriched him lives on — and the incoming Trump administration figures to make that system even worse. The corporate-friendly Heritage Foundation, in its controversial Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, is proposing that Medicare Advantage become the “default option” for all new Medicare enrollees.
A move along that line, notes analyst Heather Cox Richardson, would “essentially privatize Medicare” and significantly raise the program’s cost.
With Thompson’s death, America’s health care powers feel and fear the American public’s anger now more than ever. These giants, Reuters reports, have already begun enhancing the security they provide their top execs.
The challenge for the rest of us? We need to help channel the anger about health care that so many Americans feel today toward ending the system that has so failed America’s health. We need to remake health care into a vital and vibrant public service.
Our health care system, in the end, shouldn’t be making our rich richer. Our richest instead should be paying enough in taxes to help all Americans stay healthy.
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