"Medical Credit Score" To Determine Your Health Care
This is why we need to get rid of every single one of these rat bastards who put a price on keeping people alive and healthy.
The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers.The project, dubbed “MedFICO” in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.
. . .Several published reports have described Healthcare Analytics product as a MedFICO score, computed in a way that would be familiar to those who've used credit scores. The firm is gathering payment history information from large hospitals around the country, according to a magazine called Inside ARM, aimed at “accounts receivable management” professionals. It will then analyze that data to predict how likely patients will be to pay future medical bills. As with credit reports and scores, patients who've failed to pay past bills will be deemed less likely to pay future bills.
The idea sounds ominous to Pam Dixon, who runs the World Privacy Forum, which studies medical privacy issues.
"This is a bad idea and I don't think this benefits the consumer at all," Dixon said. "And what about victims of medical ID theft? Are we going to deny treatment to these people because they have a terrible MedFICO score?"
So which is it? Is health care a human right or a commodity reserved for those able to pay for it. The corporate pigs at the HMOs already have their answer, what's yours?