Credit Reporting on Bill I Refused to Pay
I was wondering if there is a way to have a negative report removed if you have a justifiable reason for not paying? Once in vacation I forgot to bring some important medicine. We called the local hospital three times to see if they could give us just a couple of pills, and were told all three times that they could. When we got there the doctor on call said there was NOTHING she could do for us. Naturally i refused to pay the bill as I am not accustomed to paying for NOTHING. They have since filed a negative report on me. Does that seem fair to you?
(Always enjoy seeing you on WGN)
Terry Says
It isn’t fair — but it doesn’t surprise me. You handled this the wrong way. Instead of just refusing to pay, you should have contacted the hospital billing office, and eventually escalated your fight to the hospital administration if you weren’t satisfied. Instead, you likely talked to a clerk in the accounting department — and they are trained just to send a bill to collection and file a report with the credit bureaus if there has been no resolution.
If this happened recently, I would definitely contact the hospital and ask to meet with a manager — and try to get them to retract the report and write off the charges. But at this point it is tough to get this taken off your credit report –and it will continue to impact your credit score for years until it “rolls off” your report. You are entitled to submit an explanation to the credit bureau to be “attached” to your credit report. But honestly, I doubt that anyone reads those things as everything is done by computer.
