Lack of debtors' right to notification of debt

This article covers the injustice of the lack of a right of debtors to be notified of their debts and to receive bills.

## Background

In money and finances, people owe **debt** after incurring certain types of monetary charges. This is especially true in medicine, in which patients receive medical care in hospitals and owe compensation for the services after the fact. Debt in the United States is governed by laws such as the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Although these laws provide significant rights to debtors including medical patients to ensure the correctness of debt and information reported to credit bureaus as well as to make disputes, they and other laws typically do not require that a debtor be notified of the debt or receive a bill from the **creditor** in the first place. Oftentimes, creditors -- such as hospitals -- are negligent in sending bills to the wrong postal address or otherwise failing to call or notify the debtor or send a bill to them, causing the debtor to fail to pay the bill simply due to being legitimately unaware of the charges. Debtors often find out long after the fact that they owed certain bills and that their credit score was negatively impacted, even when this is due to bills that could easily have been paid had they been known by the debtors. Because the laws do not protect against this, debtors can be marked late in paying even if they pay the past-due bills that were unbeknownst to them.

Specifically in the medical field, due to the unique way that medical bills work -- e.g., many different providers, contractors, and firms can bill a given patient at different times for all of the services received during a single hospital stay -- a patient typically has a very difficult time knowing in advance all of the bills that he/she will owe. When some of these creditors fail to duly notify the patient-debtor by properly communicating the debt, a patient-debtor can easily fail to be cognizant of such charges.

In most jurisdictions especially in the U.S., a debt never technically "expires" and has no statute of limitations, even if the right of a creditor to sue for the debt does expire and even if the right for the debt to be reported does expire.

## Arguments in favor of regarding as an injustice

When a debtor is not notified of his/her debt, he/she cannot possibly be at fault or have the scienter to be held accountable for the failure to pay the debt. It is fundamentally unfair for people to be "on the hook" for charges that they never even knew about. It should be rudimentarily required that creditors notify the debtor in good faith; if a creditor makes incorrect communications or clerical errors (calls the wrong telephone number or mails to the wrong address), then the creditor should be at fault for the error. People should have a right to receive a bill as fundamental communication to notify them of the existence of the debt; a bill should not be "just a courtesy".

## Arguments against regarding as an injustice

Many people want more excuses not to pay their bills. Requiring creditors to always send a bill correctly will create more paperwork and will be a hindrance to creditors being able to recover debts that are owed to them.