Have you ever received a medical bill — even though you hadn’t been to the doctor or a hospital in a year? Or opened a letter from a collection agency regarding a debt you had paid off months earlier?

If that’s happened to you, you’re not alone. A new report by the Colorado Public Interest Research Foundation, called CoPIRG, and the Frontier Group says that Colorado ranks seventh nationally for the most complaints per-capita for mistakes in medical billing, with 7.2 complaints per 100,000 residents.

The complaints are filed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which is the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts. In the wake of the financial crisis, she pushed for the creation of a watchdog agency that would do everything from stopping mortgage lenders from pushing high-priced loans to fielding complaints from consumers fed up with the often-shady practices of financial institutions.

The report comes as Colorado lawmakers — led by a senate Republican, Bob Gardner of Colorado Springs — are considering a bill to give Coloradans greater protections from predatory debt collectors. The Colorado Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Senate Bill 216, would make debt collectors do a better job of verifying they are collecting debt on the correct person.

The bill has bipartisan sponsors in the House: Susan Lontine, D-Denver, and K.C. Becker, D-Boulder.

Complaints on medical debt collectors

The report says nearly two-thirds of the complaints filed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about medical debts refer to money that was never owed in the first place, or that was discharged in bankruptcy.

The CoPirg report says that consumers have also filed many well-documented complaints of “inappropriate and aggressive” collection tactics. Those include threats of arrest and even contacting an individual’s family members and workplace. Some collection agencies allegedly go so far as posing as lawyers or police.

The director of CoPirg, Danny Katz, is a big supporter of Senate Bill 216, saying medical debt collection can lead to “a ton of lawsuits, dinged credit, and garnished wages” and “SB 216 would make a difference” for Coloradans.

Perhaps the only bit of good news for Coloradans is that the problem of aggressive and erroneous medical debt collection is even worse in six other states: Nevada, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey and Maryland.