Medical Loans

Reasons you may need medical financing

Medical loans can be used to pay for virtually any type of procedure or treatment, from emergency room visits to wisdom tooth removal. You could consider opening a personal loan to cover:

Chemotherapy, dialysis and other ongoing medical treatments

Long-term care, such as physical therapy and rehabilitation

Urgent care bills from unexpected medical emergencies

Infertility treatment, in vitro fertilization

Hair loss replacement, hair restoration

Weight loss surgeries, like gastric bypass or bariatric procedures

Dental procedures, veneers or orthodontics

Cosmetic surgery procedures

Alternatives to medical loans

Negotiate medical bills

As soon as you get your medical bill, it’s good practice to call the billing department to try to negotiate the balance down. This is particularly helpful if you don’t have health insurance or if you had to get services from an out-of-network provider. You could even consider negotiating the bills down if you do have insurance but are still left with an expensive bill.

Review your bill for errors

The clerks at medical billing departments aren’t immune to errors. As an example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated a 6.27% error rate in 2020, just for Medicare Fee-For-Service alone.

Before you pay a bill, review it to make sure there aren’t any coding or clerical errors. You might consider going through a third-party service that will review your bill for errors, such as Compass Healthcare Navigation Solutions or CoPatient. Keep in mind that these services may come at a cost.

Set up a payment plan

Your hospital’s billing department may be willing to negotiate a no-interest payment plan to pay off your medical debt. These plans may be available without any eligibility requirements, so even if your income is too high to qualify for bill reduction, you still may be able to enter a payment plan.

Open a medical credit card

In lieu of a payment plan, your health care provider may work with a third-party service to offer deferred-interest financing options. For example, some providers utilize CareCredit, which offers no-interest financing as long as you pay off the procedure within a certain time frame.

It’s important to keep in mind that medical credit cards offer deferred interest, not zero interest. This means that if you don’t pay off the medical bill within the promotional period, then you’ll be hit with all of the interest that accrued from the original purchase date.

Use a credit card with a low introductory APR

You may get more favorable terms if you find a credit card with an introductory 0% APR offer. And if you have good-to-excellent credit, you could even earn cash back or travel miles using a rewards credit card with a promotional, no-interest APR period.

However, this option may not be available to those with low or no credit. Plus, this has the same pitfalls of other deferred-interest credit cards: If you don’t pay off the balance within the promotional period, then you could end up paying sky-high interest rates.

How to prequalify for medical loans

By prequalifying for a loan, you will be able to compare lenders’ rates for medical loans more easily. When you check to see if you prequalify, lenders typically do a soft-credit check on your records so as not to impact your credit score.

Lenders will weigh factors, such as your credit score and history, income and debt-to-income ratio to determine whether you are eligible for a loan. Once you’re prequalified for medical loans, you’ll want to compare details such as loan terms, APR rates and loan size. By doing this, you could end up saving yourself thousands of dollars in the long term.

See how comparing APR rates affects the overall cost: