Medical Debt can be disguised as credit card debt so its hard to get a true hold on whether clients are facing insurmountable credit card debt or medical debt when they file for bankruptcy.
Even in my personal situation I can vogue for this fact. I have three children and my wife lost her job at the end of 2007. We elected not to take COBRA coverage because it was too expensive. Two months later before she was employed again, she got pregnant and we therefore become non-insurable until after we had the baby. This put us in debt close to 20,000 dollars. I put a good portion of this on credit cards as it was easier to negotiate a reduced payment to the hospital if they were paid before check out. If we were put in the position of having to file bankruptcy, the schedules would show that we have credit card debt when in actuality its medical debt.
Fortunately both are unsecured so it wouldn’t be as bad as taking out a second mortgage on the house(who can do that anymore anyways), but nonetheless tracing what is medical debt and what is credit card debt can become hard when credit cards can mask what payments were made on.
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