Commonwealth Financial

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am new to this forum. I have been rebuilding my credit for the past 4 or 5 months and have successfully got it from 519 to 658. Today I woke up and saw that Commonwealth Financial had reported a medical bill to my credit report. This debt is from an emergency room visit back in Feb 2016 when I was in the Army while training in the field.

I called the Emergency Room and they told me that my bill for their fees was paid by Tricare but the Doctor who had treated me at that time was contracted and had their own billing. I cannot remember the doctor nor can they find out who he was. They did mention that he was supposed to get the payment information from the Army like the emergency room did but he failed to do so.  So now I am stuck with a $637 bill from years ago that knocked my credit down 59 points. This is my only collection account on any of my credit reports. I was wondering what action I should take to get this resolved and removed from my credit report. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I am willing to pay it if I have to do that to get it removed.

Thanks,

Matt

[mycreditscoreisfair]

A hospital not having any record of the doctor that treated you doesn't make much sense.

As far as the collection goes, paying it will remove the risk of potentially being sued if it's within the SOL. But likely only having it deleted will boost your credit scores. Based on other posts here regarding the collection agency, it seems they do delete their tradelines in exchange for payment.

Your best bet is to arrange a PFD agreement and get it deleted from your credit reports in exchange for payment. Unless you want to continue tracking down the doctor and/or go through insurance.

[gdale6]

As you have a different set of circumstances here some of these actions wont work (doc you dont know) so skip them and start at the right step for you. Welcome to myFico.

Medical collections are some of the easiest to get removed from your CRs, here are the steps that you should follow to address them:

1. Call the OC and see if insurance can be billed, (or-rebilled), collections ultimately paid by insurance get removed per new rules that came from CRAs settlement with 22 state AGs. If not then
2. see if you qualify for Charity Care, if not then
3. ask that they recall the collection in exchange for full payment
4. Send the reporting CA a PFD offer
5. Google the HIPAA Process and contact its creator for help, this process cannot be discussed in any forum of myFico.