For about 18 years or so I've been looking at other people's credit reports for one reason or another. And probably more than a couple hundred times I've remarked to people about the injustice of the medical collection business. Well it has finally struck home.
My wife had all three of her reports run and learned that the Equifax report contained a $20 medical collection from our pediatrician in Florida. The doctor's office was always very nice and either collected our co-pay upfront or sent us a bill if they failed to charge us at the time of service. We always paid immediately when asked. The $20 collection pulled down her Equifax score about 100 points.
Since my oldest son has some mild asthma issues we had been to see this doctor many times. We even discussed our move to North Carolina and he provided some advice on choosing a new doctor. I figured that we probably owed the $20 but there was never any attempt by the doctor or the collection agency to collect the money. They would rather charge it off and damage an otherwise perfect credit history. I was not pleased and immediately logged onto the Equifax website to dispute the collection. After all these years of talking about medical collections and credit, I was about to embark on my own dispute story.
Logging on and submitting the claim was a piece of cake. The automated email response read that our dispute had been received and we would be notified of the status within 30 days. It seemed much too easy.
But about a day or so later, I received a phone call at work from my wife. I had used her email address when submitting the claim. She doesn't check her email every day so we were lucky that she happened to receive it in time. It read that we had 24 hours from the time the email was sent to fax her social security card, driver's license and a utility bill statement with a matching address to Equifax to verify the legitimacy of the dispute. Fortunately we had time to copy the three documents and fax them first thing in the morning; an hour before the deadline. Again, an automated email response indicated receipt of our fax and instructed us to wait for approximately 30 days.
So every day she checked, and checked, and checked her email for another surprise. Then one day the email came that the dispute was resolved and the collection would be removed. That was about two months ago. Just yesterday I logged onto www.annualcreditreport.com to find out if it was removed or not. Low and behold it was gone. We saved the email and the "collection free" report, just in case.
I guess the moral of the story is that medical collections are still a racket but they CAN be removed. Be patient, follow the dispute instructions to the letter, check your email every day and go to the http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ to receive the only true free copy of each of your reports once per year.
Good luck!
