<i>&gt;I&#x27;ve never had a medical bill sent to collections, but I did have a (thankfully small) student loan sent while I was diligently paying the other loans because the mail was going to the wrong address. However, I can say from that experience that I could not pay my school at that point. The collector owned the bill. They had paid the school for it, so the school had already gotten its money.
But there&#x27;s no HIPPA violation in sending a medical bill to collections, and making false accusations like that to get out of paying a legitimate bill (or getting a legitimately delinquent account removed from your credit report) is slimy at best.</i><p>One of the accepted methods here goes as follows: 
Pay the Doctor&#x27;s Office.
Send a letter saying you refuse them to share any information about the service provided. 
Challenge the debt collector through the credit reporting agency. 
Collector will then try to get the doctor&#x27;s office to confirm the debt, which they no longer have a compelling reason to. 
CA drops it off your report because collector can no longer confirm it.<p>Works almost all the time. There is no false HIPAA accusation here.<p><i>&gt;B. Are you referring to items at collections? Then yes and no. Collection agencies will usually offer Pay-For-Delete if you ask for it in writing, in which case you pay the item and it&#x27;s removed from your report altogether. You still end up having to pay the bill. The alternative (if it&#x27;s a valid delinquency) is to let it sit for 7 years until it falls off.</i><p>Collection agencies do not like to pay-for-delete. They&#x27;ll say they&#x27;re legally bound to report exactly as it happened (also a lie). They will fight you on it if your debt isn&#x27;t significantly large enough that they&#x27;re making enough profit for it to be worth it. You can get them to do it, it will just take time and negotiating.<p><i>&gt;A. This is only possible by virtue of having little to no actual credit history. If you&#x27;re in your 30&#x27;s with a mortgage, paid off student loans and paid off vehicles, you&#x27;re not going to make massive positive changes to your report in a year without major negative items falling off.</i><p>I had 12 delinquencies removed. They were of varying difficulty, all different collectors. Some were easy, some very, very hard. One in particular I had to go so far as to pull phone records from years ago. Any negative item falling off your report is huge. Even one small $100 delinquency hurts you a ton, regardless of your history.<p>The only thing I didn&#x27;t deal with was credit card debt. I hear its a lot harder to get late payments removed, but I&#x27;ve never tackled it.