Love it, man. Pretty soon I won't have a job anywhere because of some erroneous data Equifax reports in their background check of me.
I guess my principal source of income in the future will be recycling cans!
These credit agencies are nothing but harmful for the majority of consumers.
Houses wouldn't be so expensive if nobody had access to credit. Nobody would be betting with 5-7x their yearly income.
The financial world lost its collective shit and cut Iceland off from the global credit markets. Iceland doesn't seem to be suffering to me.
And their prisons are nicer than club fed :)
What I'm talking about isn't the actual data leak but rather what equifax did or did not do before and after the leak. That is the real crime here. I don't see the CEO and the board facing prison which means we need to change something.
We're a nation of laws, not pitchforks.
We are a nation of what we choose to be laws and right now it feels like we are a nation where there's no responsibility for the people at the top. Plausible deniability has gone too far. As with everything in life, we need to seek balance and the balance is making sure the board and the CEO have an incentive to ensure the organization isn't systemically violating the spirit of the law.
We are a nation of laws but laws aren't something we got from the mountaintop. We need to tweak things sometimes.
This means creating new laws.
It makes it technically true yet completely useless.
So maybe Jim Bob knocked off a web site for fans of My Little Pony and got all their plaintext passwords. He offers the list of accounts for $5 on a Tor hidden site. Steve the CSID employee guesses that Jim Bob is too lazy to change the password each time he does this, and types in "opensesame" to get the data for $0. CSID (and thus Experian) tells the MLP fans their account data was compromised.
Now they have my attention! If the hackers got that data, I really hope they make it public. Imagine the shit storm that would follow. Those women who are "bad negotiators" would know EXACTLY how much less they were making for the same work. Please please please, dump that specific info! It would also teach all our companies a lesson about selling that private data too, wouldn't it?
All my bad debt will seem better when everyone else's is inflated with fake debt!
(p.s. Being sick in America is not a fun time financially.)
If you're sick enough to be paying a large fraction of a years salary in healthcare expenses, the better bet may be to stop working entirely and get on Medicaid, SSDI, TANF, etc. until you are back on your feet.
But you did say debt which means it's likely you're well past this point.
Additionally I can't remember if I hallucinated it, but a lot of lenders have stopped looking at medical debt! Seriously! I read it in a few different places but I don't have official info for you. Lenders would have nobody to lend to if they considered medical debt.
I once had a psycho hospital misbill me using fake insurance codes and etc for routine work. My insurance company refused to pay because of the codes the hospital billed me for. So I said lol I'm not giving you $800 for a free physical. They screamed and shouted that they'll see me at collections.
Three years later and it never showed up on any of my credit reports. Get you some of that!!
Most of my large medical bills end up going to a debt collector and they tend to 2-3 times a day per collector. But, they're not jerks on the phone at least, and try to setup a payment plan.
However, I had one MRI that was ~$2000 (typical) and after ~6 months they lowered it to like $400-600. That's the only time any medical provider cut me a deal. Oh, actually, one debt collector gave me a large discount for paying it all in a one-time payment.
But I've never had someone simply "not" attempt to collect their debt.
53% of disability claims are denied, and the average SSDI payment is $1171/month. Having helped my mother through the disability process, as well as helping build tooling for disability advocacy non-profits, I can tell you how little government assistance is available to sick people in the US.
Are there services available? Possibly. Can you count on receiving them? Absolutely not.
Medicaid at least, the only qualification is not having too much income. Medicaid I think is way better than Medicare, at least in the states I would live in.