System being designed to help hospitals figure out whether you’ll pay them
By Jason Roberson
The Dallas Morning News
December 12, 2007
Mortgage lenders aren’t the only ones showing more interest in your credit score these days – the health industry is creating its own score to judge your ability to pay.
The new medFICO score, being designed with the help of credit industry giant Fair Isaac Corp., could debut as early as this summer in some hospitals.
Healthcare Analytics, a Waltham, Mass., health technology firm, is developing the score. It is backed by funding from Fair Isaac, of Minneapolis; Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp.; and venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners, also based in Waltham. Each kicked in $10 million for the project.
The score is already raising questions from consumer advocacy groups that fear it will be checked before patients are treated. People with low medical credit scores could receive lower-quality care than those with a healthy medFICO, they argue.
(Steve Mooney, Tenet’s senior vice president of patient financial services) says the hospital business has changed over the past 30 years to take on characteristics of the retail industry. With patients expected to pay a larger share and do more comparison shopping, they soon will be able to purchase health care much like an automobile, he said.
Pamela Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a consumer advocacy group, isn’t impressed. “I don’t like it; I don’t like it at all. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. This isn’t some car.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/121207dnbushealthcredit.299ccc0.html#
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
You can get an idea of the magnitude of the growth in the market of inadequate underinsurance products when the industry has identified yet another administrative service that they can sell us: a medical FICO score to determine the creditworthiness of patients who have significant out-of-pocket expenses as a result of today’s higher cost-sharing requirements.
And soon we’ll be purchasing health care much like an automobile? Does that mean that we’ll have to negotiate with the health care salesman who will have to obtain the approval of the health sales manager (after checking our medFICO score) before we can drive away with our health care?
Anything to keep the government out of our health care.