It does not matter where you come down on the Healthcare Reform Act Political Hot Potato… its the law and we will see where it leads us.
Specific to our industry, as a Debt Collection Agency in Florida, we found the following article rather hopeful for our industry.
http://www.acainternational.org/healthcaremarket-study-massachusetts-health-care-reform-led-to-declines-in-bankruptcy-debt-and-collection-balances-31210.aspx
It seems intuitive though, if people have a way to pay for health related expenses, their debt load will go down, bankruptcy’s will decline, and collection actions will go down.
“The effects of reform on credit score, personal bankruptcy and delinquency are most pronounced for those whose credit scores were lower before the reform, but those with higher credit scores (and therefore, better access to credit) experienced a larger relative decline in total debt,” according to the researchers, Bhashkar Mazumder from the Fed and Sarah Miller from Notre Dame.
It might seem counter intuitive that a debt collection agency is please to see anything that will cause debt collection to go down, but we are a bit of a counter intuitive in how we approach debt collections.
To see this type of positive result from Health Care Reform is a good sign, and we will be watching for further developments.
Mark.
