I’m Canadian. And I’m already sorry for asking an ignorant question.
I know you have to pay for hospital visits in the states. I know lower economic status can come with lower access to birth control and sex education. But then, how do they afford to give birth? Do people ever avoid hospital visits because they don’t feel like they can’t afford it?
Do hospitals put people on a payment plan? Is it possible to give birth and not pay if you don’t have the means? How does it work in the states?
How does it all work?
Again. Canadian. And sorry.
At least in my experience, we’ll generally be able to go to the hospital
Generally, I’ve just seen the debt transferred to a debt collection agency afterwards, since there’s no money for them to take. They’ll harass you, and it affects your credit score, but they can’t send you to jail
Credit score? Is it like the Chinese social credit system?
Yeah, just the American version
It affects where you can rent housing, what houses you can buy, whether you can get a car, etc
Love how everyone went insane with the social credit score while you got the same shit done to you and no one batted an eye
US credit score won’t get you sent to jail or a re-education camp, at least. At least, not yet.
It will condem you to poverty tho, which may be even worse than jail
It can impact everything in your life, even jobs and housing now. It’s practically the same thing except instead of being forced to live in a camp you’re living on the street.
And if you dare get together with other people that are forced onto the street and make a camp together somewhere isolated, the government tears it down and evicts you and destroys your things. Thank god for our freedom.
My favorite part is when one of the three companies that does ours leaked all of our data with relatively no consequences.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement
Well if it’s the free market abusing us it’s okay. That’s just freedom.
I mean it’s not like your credit score immediately gets affected for something like jaywalking though.
I’m not sure that’s entirely the bar we should be aiming for
It can even impact being hired for jobs. Low credit score? You might be untrustworthy or motivated to steal
Not only American. We in Germany have shit like that and most other European nations have it as well afaik
It exists in most places from what I can tell, but the specific implementation may differ
The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between
“when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that” in Europe (at least my country) and
“credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you’re screwed if it’s bad because half of everything runs on credit”.
There’s also the fact that credit rating agencies in North America have hardly any supervision and are prone to make mistakes because they take correlated data by face value.
I think my credit report still says I work at “DOMINOES” after like 5 years of not being there. It doesn’t effect anything, but I get mild amusement out of it being misspelled on top of that.
I don’t have a credit score, and have never had a problem renting. It’s getting a mortgage that I can’t do without a partner who’s been consistently paying off a credit card for decades.
My credit score wasn’t good enough, so I had to show the last place I rented 6 months of my employers payments to rent
I’ve never missed a payment, nor do I have any debt. I just don’t exist in the system enough to rent
The US version is a system that calculates the risk of loaning money vs being paid back. In order to be approved for a loan the credit score is used to evaluate whether or not it is likely to be paid back within the terms of the loan. As a result those with bad credit have trouble getting favorable terms for cars, housing and basically anything that can’t be purchased outright. Does it negatively affect people for things outside of their control and perpetuate cycles of poverty? Absolutely, but it is based in actual fiscal risk to calculate sustainable loan practices.
China on the other hand took the US term of “credit” and abused the everloving shit out of it to punish people that the government dislikes. Did your cousin post a Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh meme? Well too bad that you were shopping for a house, because your “credit” is no longer high enough to not be homeless. You should have thought of that before you were related to someone who disagreed with the government!
Not being able to demonstrate to a bank that you are financially reliable enough to pay back a loan is unfortunate, but a rational reason for an unfavorable interest rate or denial of a loan. Making people ineligible for even renting an apartment that is within their financial means because the dictator in charge dislikes you is a completely different thing altogether.
It’s similar but only take into account financial and professional information. As I understand it, the Chinese version also covers your daily activities.
As the name hints, a credit score is used to rate the risk of making you a loan. It’s not some essential personal ID. It only comes into play if you are applying for credit and is a set of shared records that financial institutions and private companies use to decide if loaning you money is a good risk or not.
Someone else said it’s used to decide if you can get a car and that’s not accurate. If you need to borrow money to buy a car, your credit history will be checked. It’s the loan, not the car.
Is it crazy that lenders would want to know if you’ve walked away from your bills in the past? Making it sound like dystopian China is a gross exaggeration.
At this point, pretty much
Not really. It just keeps track of how often you miss your credit card payments so creditors will know how high of a risk you are to lend money to. If affects if you can get loans and what interest rates you can get on loans. But if you just pay your loans/credit card bills, you’ll be fine.
yes, but in the classically American fashion we only care about money so much only the money stuff even goes into calculating it
Well yeah, because it’s only used when talking about loaning money…
Would a hospital ever refuse you care if you have outstanding bills or hospital bills with collections?
It’s illegal in the Emergency Room. Anywhere else they can. Poor people end up relying on Emergency care, ignoring bills, and the hospitals write it off as “charity care,” which helps them justify their non-profit status, when they’re non-profits
Depends on the severity of the issue.
For a life threatening emergency, no
For like pain relief, yes
The hospital must stabilize you and save your life from immediate danger. They don’t have to make you better or solve the problem.