ATLANTA – U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., is joining a renewed push by Senate Democrats to remove medical debt from credit reports.

Warnock, chairman of a Senate Banking subcommittee, and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, the committee’s chairman, are asking the head of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to complete proposed rulemaking aimed at protecting families from being penalized for seeking medical care.

“This rule would provide vital protections,” the two senators wrote in a letter to CFPB Director Rohit Chopra dated Dec. 10. “It would bar lenders from broadly using information about medical debt to make credit eligibility determinations, prohibit the inclusion of medical debt on credit reports, prohibit creditors from repossessing medical devices … and not penalize people for seeking treatment and care.”

In Georgia, 27% of rural residents have medical collections on their credit report, 10 percentage points higher than the national average.

“This issue is far too important to remain unsettled any longer,” Warnock and Brown wrote in the letter to Chopra. “We respectfully urge you to swiftly finalize this rule.”

The CFPB was created in 2012 as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and has been a target of congressional Republicans ever since.

The latest salvo aimed at the watchdog consumer protection agency came last week from Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire tech magnate named by GOP President-elect Donald Trump to co-lead a new federal Department of Government Efficiency. Musk called for the agency – long seen as the brainchild of liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. – to be eliminated.