Posts Tagged ‘Healthcare’
Beware First Care
By MONICA BICKING First Care, with a new location soon to open on Chicago Ave and 21st St. is not a clinic, but rather an anti-abortion counseling center. It is an organization owned by Evangelical Christians with an agenda to shame and intimidate pregnant people to mantain their pregnancy and not have an abortion. It is part of a complex and multifaceted strategy to control female bodies and prevent abortions that has made great strides with the recent overturn of Roe vs Wade. While abortion remains legal in Minnesota, anti-abortion activists continue to be hard at work to make sure access to abortion is limited in Minnesota and throughout the country. As the name implies, the strategy behind First Care is to get to people before they see a medical professional, to be the first “care” a pregnant person receives. Their marketing thickly cloaks their true agenda. Their website suggests that they have the resources needed to help someone prepare for an abortion. It states that [...]
A Bit of Good News About Your Medical Bills
By MARY ELLEN KALZUA No, President Biden is not forgiving them. Sorry. The good news is that beginning July 1st, paid medical bills will no longer appear on your credit reports. The three major credit bureaus also announced that starting July 1, medical bills now have to be a year old (previously 6 months) before they can be reported. Plus, starting January 2023, only medical bills $500 or more will be reported. The announcement came after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released findings that medical bills comprise the majority of reported collection accounts, to the tune of $88 billion, keeping credit scores down like a cement block in water. I’ve seen credit scores drop nearly 100 points from a medical collection of less than $25! A 100 point drop is devastating. It means a person may suddenly no longer qualify for a mortgage or be able to rent. They have to pay more for car insurance and their phone. They are charged higher interest rates, which can mean [...]
