Of course, I know WHY they won’t let you discharge student loans as easily, aside from their own enlightened self-interest.
I’m sure half of the students out there would gladly run through a BS at Duke, a Master’s at Yale and then get their PhD at Harvard, then immediately bankrupt on the five quizillion dollar debt they racked up to their lenders.
Can’t say I wouldn’t have been tempted…
I don’t share your feeing that CAs are doing something morally wrong. I’ve been on the “didn’t get paid” end of business deals before, and having the option of selling off or assigning my non-performing accounts receivable, recovering some of my losses, and getting back to my real job sounds like a nice option to have.
Of course, this verges on GD. I will say that the existence of CAs in theory is a good thing, but the actual execution of the idea is sleazy.
As regards their percentages, the discount or fee that CAs receive versus the face value of the debt ranges widely.
I’ve seen one CA that buys perfectly good (zero days old) medical debts from doctors’ offices for 90 cents on the dollar. In that case they’re really more outsourced billing than collections, and they act like they’re your doctor collecting, but if you don’t pay, the doctor gets the same amount and the CA transfers your account to another division of the same company that does act like a collection agency.
I noticed one of my medical providers did this… the “billing department” and the “collection agency” happenned to have the same post office box.
On the other end of things, there are agencies on the “bottom-feeder” end of the CA chain that buy debt that is beyond the statute of limitations from the original creditor (or other agencies that failed to collect) for as low as one cent on the dollar.