Conor Keenan was biting into a burger at McDonald’s when he felt one of his back molars crack. He was in his early 20s and couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to the dentist. His family never had dental insurance growing up.
Mortified, he found a dentist open late near where he lived in Chicago.
He had a single credit card, no extra money and no health insurance.
“[The bill] was several thousands of dollars,” he recalls. “I was handed a brochure for CareCredit, so that’s what I did.”
CareCredit, operated by Synchrony Bank, is a type of medical credit card advertised in clinical offices for people who don’t have the means to pay for their outstanding bills. Other vendors of similar products include Wells Fargo Health Advantage and Alphaeon Credit.
While Keenan acknowledges that he could have used his personal credit card for the purchase, paying off the charge over time would have accrued monthly interest.
Plus, he said, there was something impactful about having “an authority figure” at the dentist’s office directly recommending a financial product. It swayed him, and a quick CareCredit application was approved to pay the dentist in full.
It was only after completing and paying for the procedure that Keenan learned about deferred interest on the expense.
If he didn’t pay off the entire balance by the end of the 12 month 0% annual percentage rate (APR) period, he would be liable to pay all of the interest that accumulated throughout that time, which was likely in the neighborhood of 30% of the initial bill, plus late fees.
His anxiety spiked, and he vowed to pay off the card as soon as possible. He lowered his daily expenses. He stopped going out to eat, and ate rice and beans every Sunday. He hit his deadline and paid the card off in its entirety in a year without paying a dime in interest.
But that’s not the story for thousands of Americans. From 2018 to 2020, medical credit cards paid $23 billion in healthcare expenditures and generated $1 billion in deferred interest payments, which was pure profit from the 1 in 4 patients who take out these loans and can’t pay them back in time.
Depending on who you ask, this population — young adults like Keenan — with no insurance, minimal credit access and zero cash, receives a valuable tool through these products to access financing they couldn’t otherwise.
But to others, those same people are being sold something by entities that are confident they’ll fail and end up with something to gain.
Here’s what to know about medical credit cards and how to recognize them when you see them out in the wild.
Medical credit cards 101
Medical credit cards are a bit different from your typical Visa or American Express, which charge interest — usually around 20% to 30% APR — on anything you don’t pay back each month.
Instead, there’s a promotional financing period — often six months to two years — during which you don’t have to pay any interest. If you pay off your entire balance within that period, you’ve essentially scored yourself an interest-free loan.
But if you don’t pay the whole thing off by the end of the promo period, you’re stuck with whatever is left of your initial bill plus interest — and not just on what’s remaining, but on the original purchase amount, which includes what you already paid off.
Like Keenan, you’re most likely to see these types of credit cards when you’re facing trouble with your teeth. According to a 2025 JAMA Health Forum analysis, about two-thirds of dentists’ offices offer medical credit cards to patients.
Podiatrists come in second place (45.7% of offices offer them), followed by chiropractors (29.7%), physical medicine and rehabilitation (25.5%), dermatologists (20.5%), pharmacists (18.3%) and imaging and radiology (14%).
Across the board, these products can often be found in clinical settings where patients need care ASAP, but they may not have insurance that covers the specialty.
But they’re also offered on hospital billing webpages, according to Patricia Kelmar, the senior director of Health Care Campaigns at US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).
“[Medical credit cards] are everywhere, not just in the dentist’s and eye doctors’ offices anymore,” she explained at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in May. “[This is] one of those areas where people really can get themselves in deeper debt than just their original medical bills.”
These loans typically need to be paid back in 12 to 18 months to avoid deferred interest, Kelmar noted. There is often a required monthly payment as part of the fine print, so if patients pay less than the minimum payment every month, they will be charged a late fee.
Kelmar has also seen situations where the minimum payment dictated by the credit card provider is actually less than the amount necessary to fully pay off the loan and avoid deferred interest.
“They’re essentially setting up every single patient to miss the full payment amount,” she said. “This interest can be in the 30s, up to 39%.”
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, medical credit card providers can choose to cover necessary procedures, elective ones, or both. As of 2023, Alphaeon has only provided financing for elective procedures.
It presents thorny moral questions for consumers, medical providers and lenders alike. Is it predatory to provide a patient seeking out an elective plastic surgery, for example, a financing option for a procedure that isn’t even necessary?
There is also an element of vulnerability at play that intersects with patient trust in such a setting.
Most people shop for credit cards from the comfort of their home with all of the information at hand, Kelmar said. For those who are facing a necessary procedure, the ethics of signing on for a card at point-of-sale are sticky, and determining whose responsibility it really is to avoid growing medical debt remains hazy.
Looking ahead
To this day, Keenan has mixed feelings about medical credit cards. He wouldn’t personally use one again unless the payment plan made sense, but even teasing out different types of financing in medical establishments is tricky.
Last year, he broke a toe and went into the emergency room. The hospital offered to split his $1,500 bill into payments of $250 for six months, which he then paid for on the hospital’s internal payment system.
While that financing was just a simple payment plan with the hospital, it’s not unlikely that a consumer could get confused between a medical credit card product — sold in a clinical setting with 30% deferred interest — and financing with the medical establishment itself.
“I think [medical credit cards are] absolutely expanding, for better or for worse,” Keenan said. “It’s a double-edged sword… The main benefit of [these cards] is for folks with a mid-600s credit score…Without these types of players in the marketplace, I don’t know where a lot of these folks are able to go.”