2020 Democratic U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event in West Branch, Iowa, August 19, 2019.

There could be a new factor to your credit score: the president of the United States.

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders wants to eliminate the private credit reporting companies and substitute them with a government-managed credit registry. The proposal was released over the weekend and, at the same time, Sanders announced his plan to erase $81 billion in past-due medical debt, one of the main issues dogging Americans' credit reports today.

Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., says the public credit registry would be housed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created in 2011 to protect Americans from predatory lenders in the wake of the financial crisis. According to Sanders' campaign, the new system would use a "transparent algorithm to determine creditworthiness that eliminates racial biases in credit scores" and allows Americans to access their credit scores for free. Medical debts would be excluded from people's reports.

"We must and we will remove the profit motive from assessing the creditworthiness of American consumers," Sanders' announcement reads.

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There are three major, private credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. These companies collect data on people's borrowing patterns, including their payment histories and any potential bankruptcies or tax liens.

Critics of the current system point to how Equifax's insufficient data security practices allowed it to suffer a massive hack in 2017 that led to more than 140 million Americans having their personal information exposed and to studies that show people's credit reports, which can determine if they're hired for a job or how much they'll pay for a car, are riddled with errors.

"Credit reporting companies don't have a financial incentive to improve accuracy," said Amy Traub, associate director of policy and research at the liberal-leaning policy group Demos, which has advocated for a public credit registry. Sanders' version, she said, "would serve consumers as its central mission, and would have a mandate to invest in accurate data."

Our current credit reporting system also intensifies racial inequality, Traub said.