get the education they paid for. Instead, stu-
dents in such programs are provided with poor 
quality training, often for low-wage jobs or in 
occupations where there are simply no job op-
portunities. They find themselves with large 
amounts of debt and, too often, end up in de-
fault. In many cases, students are drawn into 
these programs with confusing or misleading in-
formation.’’. 
(4) MEDICAL DEBT.— 
(A) Research by the Consumer Bureau has 
found that the inclusion of medical collections 
on consumer reports has unfairly reduced con-
sumers’ credit scores. 
(B) The Consumer Bureau’s review of 5 
million anonymized credit files from September 
2011 to September 2013, for example, found 
that credit scores may underestimate a person’s 
creditworthiness by up to 10 points for those 
who owe medical debt, and may underestimate 
a person’s creditworthiness by up to 22 points 
after the medical debt has been paid. For con-
sumers with lower credit scores, especially those 
on the brink of what is considered subprime, a 
10 to 22 point decrease in their credit scores 
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can have a significant impact on their lives, in-
cluding by affecting whether they are able to 
qualify for credit and, if so, the terms and con-
ditions under which it is extended to them. 
(C) The Consumer Bureau found that half 
of all collections trade lines that appear on con-
sumer reports are related to medical bills 
claimed to be owed to hospitals and other med-
ical providers. These trade lines affect the re-
ports of nearly 1/5 of all consumers in the cred-
it reporting system. 
(D) The Consumer Bureau has found that 
there are no objective or enforceable standards 
that determine when a debt can or should be 
reported as a collection trade line. Because debt 
buyers and collectors determine whether, when, 
and for how long to report a collection account, 
there is only a limited relationship between the 
time period reported, the severity of a delin-
quency, and when or whether a collection trade 
line appears on a consumer’s credit report. 
(E) Medical bills can be complex and con-
fusing for many consumers, which results in 
consumers’ uncertainty about what they owe, to 
whom, when, or for what, that may cause some 
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people, who ordinarily pay their bills on time, to 
delay or withhold payments on their medical 
debts. This uncertainty can also result in med-
ical collections appearing on consumer reports. 
In a December 2014 report titled ‘‘Consumer 
Credit Reports: A Study of Medical and Non- 
Medical Collections’’, the Consumer Bureau 
found that a large portion of consumers with 
medical collections show no other evidence of fi-
nancial distress and are consumers who ordi-
narily pay their other financial obligations on 
time. Unlike with most credit products or serv-
ices, such as credit cards, installment loans, 
utilities, or wireless or cable services that have 
contractual account disclosures describing the 
terms and conditions of use, most consumers 
are not told what their out-of-pocket medical 
costs will be in advance. Consumers needing ur-
gent or emergency care rarely know, or are pro-
vided, the cost of a medical treatment or proce-
dure before the service is rendered. 
(F) The Consumer Bureau concluded that 
the presence of medical collections is less pre-
dictive of future defaults or serious delin-
quencies than the presence of a nonmedical col-
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lection in a study titled ‘‘Data Point: Medical 
Debt and Credit Scores’’, issued in May 2014. 
(G) FICO’s latest credit scoring model, 
‘‘FICO 9’’, changes the treatment of paid col-
lections to disregard any collection matters that 
the consumer has paid in full. FICO 9, how-
ever, is not yet widely used by lenders. 
(H) VantageScore’s latest credit scoring 
model, ‘‘VantageScore 4.0’’, will be available in 
the fall of 2017. This model will penalize med-
ical collections less than non-medical ones. 
(I) The three nationwide CRAs entered 
into a settlement agreement with the New York 
State attorney general in 2015 to address defi-
ciencies in their dispute resolution process and 
enhance the accuracy of items on reports. These 
policy changes will be implemented in a three- 
phrased rollout, culminating by June 2018. 
Subsequently, these CRAs entered into a coop-
erative agreement with 31 State Attorneys Gen-
eral, which was the basis of the creation of the 
National Consumer Assistance Plan (‘‘NCAP’’) 
to change some of their business practices. 
(J) While the CRAs appear to be volun-
tarily adopting policy changes on a nationwide 
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basis, they are not obligated to do so for con-
sumers who reside in States that are not party 
to any of the consent orders. 
(K) As a result of the settlement agree-
ments, the three nationwide CRAs will set a 
180-day waiting period before including medical 
collections on a report and will remove a med-
ical collection from a report once it is paid by 
an insurance company. While this change will 
benefit many, once a medical collection appears 
on a report, it will only be deleted or suppressed 
if it is found to have been the insurance com-
pany’s obligation to pay and the insurer pays it. 
Given the research showing there is little pre-
dictive value in medical debt information, med-
ical collections that are paid or settled should 
quickly be removed from a report, regardless of 
who pays or settles this debt. 
(5) FINANCIAL ABUSE BY KNOWN PERSONS.— 
(A) Financial abuse and exploitation are 
frequently associated with domestic violence. 
This type of abuse may result in fraudulent 
charges to a credit card or having fraudulent 
accounts created by the abuser in the survivor’s 
name. Financial abuse may also result in the 
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