Honeypot.net

One of our credit card companies, acting as “Californians for Medical Privacy”, is opposing CA’s AB 2746. They say:

Lenders could need to know what medical services you received, if they were “medically necessary”, and potentially, even your private treatment details, if AB 2746 (Schiavo) were to become law.

Liars.

California’s existing law basically says that you can’t use a person’s medical debt against them when making credit decisions. Someone getting sick and racking up an enormous medical bill because their insurer denied, defended, and deposed, is not something they could have reasonably foreseen and avoided. It’s a different category of debt than, say, maxing out your credit cards in Las Vegas.

The new changes would clarify and expand the definition of “medical debt” in reasonable ways. The members of Californians for Medical Privacy claim they’d need to know why you borrowed money on a credit card to pay a hospital bill. While it’s not completely wrong, it’s a flashback to COVID times when people said dumb things like “I’m not allowed to tell you whether I have a fever because of HIPPA¹” to avoid getting kicked out of a bar for having the plague.

See, if you’re allowed to tell them that you charged $10,000 to pay an emergency room to fix a broken arm, then they can’t hold that against you when you apply for a mortgage. They’d much rather hold your future in their greedy little hands while you sell your car to pay for a root canal. Their explanation of the law is probably more or less correct. Their claims about the implications of it to us, the residents of California, the patients, and the borrowers, are complete lies.

I didn’t know about AB 2746 until our credit card — which we’re closing today — told us about it. And now that I know what it is, and the lies lenders will tell to oppose it, they’ve convinced me to be in favor of it.

The icing on the cake was their email footer:

ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.

This was an political astroturfing campaign, not an “account servicing email”.

Again: Liars.