Lindsey Vance carried medical debt for nearly half her life.
The 41-year-old Denver resident said her debt began stacking up when she was around 19, when she stopped being covered under her parents’ health insurance and turned to the emergency room for health care related to injuries and illnesses.
“If I made enough money at the time, I would have, of course, paid my bills. I couldn’t afford to go see a doctor, and I certainly couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills when they came,” she said. “So I was in a situation for a long time where I was accruing medical debt but not able to pay it off.”
That debt prevented her from having a car, apartment or credit card in her name for most of her adult life, because it appeared on her credit report and worked against her loan application. The family’s cars are in her husband’s name, and her in-laws co-signed on their Colorado apartment.
She is now both insured and in a better situation financially and was able to get her very first credit card a few months ago.
“But my credit has been absolutely terrible my entire adult life because of the medical debt,” she said.
A recently-enacted law aims to help the estimated 700,000 Coloradans like Vance with medical debt by removing it from consumer credit reports. The law is one of several policies Colorado lawmakers have advanced in recent years to lessen the burden of medical debt. Another recent law caps the allowable interest on the debt to 3% and aims to ensure transparency with consumers. In conjunction with the state’s Hospital Discounted Care program, created in 2021 for uninsured and low-income patients, and other debt-related laws, experts say that Colorado is a leader among states when it comes to medical debt protection policies.
“Colorado is definitely at the forefront, especially with the recently enacted legislation,” said Maanasa Kona, an assistant research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms and author of a Commonwealth Fund report comparing states’ medical debt policies.